The Great Migration — the movement of millions of Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North and Midwest that accelerated dramatically after 1910 — was drawing Black workers to St. Louis in substantial numbers during Baker’s childhood. The city’s industrial economy offered wages higher than those available in the rural South, and its Black community had established churches, newspapers, and civic organizations that provided a foundation for the new arrivals. It was also a city in which the color line was enforced by custom, by law, and by violence, and in which Black residents navigated a daily geography of restriction that shaped every aspect of life.
The specific neighborhood Baker grew up in — East St. Louis, technically across the river in Illinois, is part of the broader story of her childhood, though the Missouri side of the river was her primary home — was among the poorest areas of a city that had substantial pockets of deep poverty. Her mother’s work as a washerwoman was common among Black women of her economic stratum in that era; it required physical labor, provided minimal income, and offered none of the economic security that comparable labor in a formal industrial setting might have provided. The domestic work that Baker did starting at age eight — cleaning the houses of white families — was similarly characteristic of the economic options available to Black girls and women in St. Louis in the early twentieth century.
The specific violence of her early employment — the employer who put her hands in boiling water — was not an aberration within the context of domestic service in this period and place. The legal and social framework that governed the relationship between white employers and Black domestic workers in the Jim Crow era afforded workers minimal protection and afforded employers substantial impunity. Baker’s later accounts of these experiences were not exercises in self-pity; they were descriptions of normal conditions that she documented because they explained the specific shape of her life choices.