Sherri B.’s hips are hanging over the sides of her chair. When she shifts her body, the fat sways, a consequence of her middle-age operations. She doesn't seem to notice.
There is no hiding certain signs of her rough upbringing. Freckles and oblong black bumps dot the contours of her
cheek. Her chin falls into folds of skin; they move rhythmically as she speaks. Her face, distinctive and wholesome from afar, is in reality a haphazard amalgamation of beauty tips. She turns her body and looks at me. “Would you consider living in New Haven?
You wouldn’t live here, would you?”
Sherri is my janitor. Every day between ten o’clock and
noon, she climbs the steps of my entryway, jerking a sanitation cart in her
left hand and a sopping mop in her right. Her rounds have become more difficult
since she had knee surgery two months ago, and by the time she is at my room
on the fourth floor, she admits to being out of breath. When Sherri walks, the
small bulge of keys in her front pocket jingles, announcing her entry—insofar
as a janitor can get noticed.
It wasn’t like this eighteen years ago, when
Sherri first started working for Yale. She headed her own small division in
catering, where she met all the celebrities: “I was doing catering parties for
the president of Yale, I done saw presidents from different countries, I done
seen secret service from different presidents. Actors, actresses.” She loved
the job.
In 2005, she fell in a basement and needed multiple back surgeries.
Two years later, she transferred into custodial services. Her current work is
menial, uninspiring, and sometimes painful. Sherri has gotten over the demotion.
“We make 17 an hour. It might not seem like nothing but you’re not going to go
nowhere else and get that kind of money. Everyone in the inner city want to
work at Yale University.”
Her time at Yale has been her personal blessing. She met her
second husband, now of fifteen years, while he was a cook in the Calhoun
College kitchen. At her catering job, she had the power to recommend others,
and as a result Sherri’s friends and eldest daughter are all working forty hour
weeks. Due to Yale’s generous first time house-buyer program, Sherri and her
husband have a home in West Haven, and Yale has paid for twenty five thousand
of the down payment and two thousand towards taxes every year for ten years. Her
six children, four with Maurice, are taken care of for college: Yale subsidizes
half their tuition at any place of higher education. But perhaps most importantly,
Yale has taken her out of New Haven’s grittiest neighborhoods.