“The federal government was entirely complicit. When President Roosevelt passed the Social Security Act of 1935, Southern conservatives and their Northern Republican allies forced the New Deal legislation to exclude domestic workers and farmworkers from all of its employment provisions. That shielded people like us from having to pay retirement or unemployment insurance for the people who scrubbed the toilets and tended the tobacco. There was nothing clean about the way white people’s houses got cleaned in Oxford, North Carolina, including our own house” (113).