Women migrating to work as domestics is a common trend in this region. But whether they stay for six months, a year or indefinitely, those left behind tend to focus primarily on enjoying the spoils of their efforts: the latest clothes and shoes, house renovations and the cash they send via Western Union or MoneyGram. Nary is a thought given to what these women have to go through to ensure their loved ones enjoy a certain standard of living back home. In her new book, Minding Ben, author Victoria Brown throws the spotlight on this group of women, exposing the cultural and sometimes moral sacrifices they make to eke out a living. The book follows a 16-year-old Trinidadian girl, Grace Caton, who travels from the Caribbean to New York full of dreams and high expectations only to discover disappointment and abandonment from the moment she lands at JFK. She lands a job as a nanny and while she falls in love with Ben, her young charge, she has to endure some pretty strange things such as taking nude photos of Ben’s mother. The story however, goes beyond the actual trials of dealing with a stereotypical well-heeled family as a domestic to giving the reader a glimpse into the world of playground politics where nannies set their own codes for survival.
The story loosely resembles Brown’s own journey from Trinidad to the US, where she experienced the story first hand. “It is autobiographical but it is a work of fiction. It is not a memoir. My experiences were the initial inspiration, I came to New York very young, I did work as a nanny but you hear so many other stories and it is written for dramatic effect,” Brown explained via phone. Minding Ben of course immediately conjures to mind that other book about nannies, the Nanny Diaries, which caused a stir for exposing the lifestyles of the rich and famous through the eyes of a nanny. It was eventually made into a movie but Brown has never seen it or read the book and almost stopped working on her own book for fear it was too late to tell her story. “Minding Ben has been called the black Nanny Diaries and the Caribbean Nanny Diaries. I actually have not read the Nanny Diaries. When I first started working on the book in spring 2002, I was in England studying and instead of writing a thesis, I decided to write the book and right at the beginning I read a review of Nanny Diaries and said oh no, they wrote my book.
“It got such press and I thought okay, there is no way I could read this and everyone said, it is not your story, it is completely different. Now that the book is done I think now I am in a position where I think I could read it,” she said.
Brown’s book is different in that for the first time, someone has put the spotlight solely on the plight of the Caribbean domestic worker. It’s a group that goes largely unnoticed in the media but has become an indelible part of the New York mosaic. “I didn’t write the book as an anecdote to the nanny diaries but because I heard so much about it, I hadn’t seen a contemporary story about Caribbean domestic workers…you see them in the playgrounds, at Mummy and me…they are a permanent fixture in New York City life but so little is known about them. There was a conscious attempt to put West Indian women in the light. I try to have them be more just background characters. As the novel developed in my mind I thought it was a good opportunity to illuminate this group of people.” As a child growing up in deep southern village of Morne Diablo, Brown knew women who would go to the States for six months and return with barrels filled with goodies. “You had no idea what they did there but you saw them come back with barrels and you wondered about this mythical place they went to. You also heard about people who went to pick fruits, nothing sounded as exotic as picking fruits,” she said laughing.
The idea that a place that America existed motivated her to leave the country first chance she got. “Growing up in a village back then trying to figure out what’s next and you see your future and you see yourself teaching—I was also a reader, writer, listener—and you knew there was opportunity you wanted access to, so when I got that opportunity I jumped at it.” Like her protagonist, Brown landed at JFK and immediately received a cold splash of reality; America was not the fairy tale she imagined. At 16, she found a job as a nanny and worked for several years. Despite the perception that nannies generally have horrible experiences, Brown said she was lucky to have worked for employers who treated her well, sometimes as part of the family. She has even maintained friendships with some of them, including a photographer who did her promotional photos for the book. Still, Brown was determined to use babysitting as a stepping stone to greater things and to realise the opportunity that motivated her to flee from her village life.
“While I worked as a nanny, I knew that I was always bright growing up, I kind of knew I wouldn’t be 30 and be a nanny, I knew I came to America for a reason even though I was a full time domestic. I was saving money and this wasn’t going to be the thing I did forever, eventually I would go to college. “I stopped working as a nanny in 1994 and started working at a wine importing company. I felt like time literally started moving forward, it was a palpable, physical feeling.” Brown enrolled at La Guardia Community College, and then transferred to the prestigious Vassar University where she did a degree in English. She followed that up with a Masters degree in colonial and post-colonial works in English from the University of Warwick in England and is currently completing a Masters of Fine Arts at Hunter’s College where she also lectures as well. Brown’s life has not been easy by any means but with her first novel under her belt and another in the works, she wouldn’t trade her experiences for anything. “It’s only really in actively examining it and thinking about it and talking about it that you realise it was a rough pathway, otherwise it was just life. There was a plan and even when it wasn’t going the right way, there was a plan.”
