I am the granddaughter of domestic workers. My maternal grandmother was Luretha Little, an only child, who left her parents behind in North Carolina, and then her husband and two young sons in Virginia in search of freedom in New Jersey, where her sons eventually joined her and where my mother was born in 1955. In Newark, Luretha and her second husband, Elijah Griffin, had four more children. They ran a janitorial business, cleaning the offices of white doctors in Woodbridge and white scientists in New Brunswick. Sometimes they brought their children and put them to work: the twin boys swept the floors, and my mother dusted desks and polished ashtrays. My paternal grandmother, Hilda Ramdoo, was nicknamed Dolly because she was a pretty baby. One of nine children born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, she had seven of her own. By the time my father was an adult, his mother had temporarily left her husband, Antonio Tillet, and remaining six children to work in Caracas, where she cleaned the homes of the Venezuelan elite; she later …