When I was in grade school, I had a daily after-school routine before my mother got home from work. I would watch the front window for her arrival, and when I spotted her, quickly turn off the TV, dash over to the kitchen table, and pretend that I had been studying the entire time. I thought it was an ingenious scheme, but it rarely fooled my mother. She was old-school. She hovered her hand over the television, and from its heat, knew that I had been watching.
I remember this moment of motherly magic with fondness, but I also recall it with a sense of sadness. When she crossed the threshold, she was usually “bone tired,” as she would say. She worked as a computer programmer for the federal government. It was somewhat miraculous that she had that job, given her lack of college degree and generational proximity to slavery, Jim Crow, and women’s disenfranchisement.
