“I’m Quitting Your Service; I’ve Had Quite Enough”: Representations of Caregivers’ Subjectivity in Tamara Mose Brown’s Raising Brooklyn and Victoria Brown’s Minding Ben

During her interview for a caregiving position in Manhattan with the Bruckner family, protagonist Grace Caton, a migrant from Trinidad, is asked to read to her prospective charge, the eponymous child in Minding Ben. Taking Ben’s favourite picture book, Nancy Willard’s Pish, Posh, Said Hieronymus Bosch, Grace begins:
“Once upon a time there was an artist named Hieronymus Bosch who loved odd creatures. Not a day passed that the good woman who looked after his house didn’t find a new creature lurking in a corner or sleeping in a cupboard. To her fell the job of feeding them”—Ben recited along with me—“weeding them, walking them, stalking them, calming them, combing them, scrubbing and tucking in all of them—until one day—” (34).
The passage breaks off here, but in a later episode, Grace completes the verse for us; she describes hearing Ben and his parents, Miriam and Sol, reading the same section, and bursting out in unison, “Until one day ... I’m quitting your service, I’ve had quite enough ...” (102). If Miriam and Sol seem oblivious to the implications of these lines, Grace surely appreciates their meaning. As the “good woman” looking after the Bruckners’ child and home, Grace embodies the plight of caregivers—who are overwhelmingly racialized and often (undocumented) immigrants—to children of privileged, typically white families in the Global North. Although they are often overworked and undervalued, for these women, quitting is usually not an option. Minding Ben provides the space where caregivers like Grace and her cohort articulate their pent-up feelings of enduring “quite enough” oppression on the job and how they are led to the brink physically, psychologically, and emotionally.