At its core, this discussion explores how black female laborers in fiction embody the process of refraction when they confront racial, gender, and class inequities. How can the relationship between a prism and the refraction of rays enable an interpretation of black female domestic laborers’ experiences? To answer this question this study examines Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) and Alice Childress’ Like One of the Family: Conversations From a Domestic’s Life (1956). Wilkerson engages with this process of refraction in her introduction to the edited anthology 9 Plays by Black Women (1986) when she maintains that: “Black women are a prism through which the searing rays of race, class and sex are first focused, then refracted” (xiii). In summarizing Snell’s findings, Trefil contends that the light beam bends at an angle when it travels across the border “between two media” (365). happens when the refracted ray strikes a surface at more than a critical angle to the perpendicular” (365). He further asserts that this “otal internal reflection. discovered the simple law that governs the path of a refracted ray” (367, 365). Trefil notes that in 1621 the “Dutch mathematician and physicist. When describing the process of refraction, scholar James Trefil offers the following explanation: “What happens to wavefronts of light when they cross a boundary between different media is the subject of Snell’s law, which is named for Willebrord Snell” (365). Keywords: Black women, domestic workers, agency, resistance, prism, refraction, and discrimination.

Return to Contents» Prisms and Refractions: Portrayals of Domestic Laborers in Ann Petry’s The Street and Alice Childress’ Like One of the Family: Conversations From a Domestic’s Life / Claudia May

Lutie johnson the street