In his poem, Mount Helicon, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney famously writes:

I rhyme / to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

In that same poem, he describes a white face hovering at the bottom of a well. (It’s his reflection.)

For generations, white faces also hovered—quietly and below stairs—in the homes of the wealthy. That many of these women were the same ages as their employers, that they possessed similar skills (and sentiments) was generally ignored.

(“Lineage is but an accident”, wrote a young Lillian Pettengill.)

What made one woman an heiress and another a laundress? The slippage between rich and poor seems important, here. Blurring the line between the blouse and the apron, a uniform becomes a straitjacket. White. And hovering.