In Alice Childress's Like One of the Family ... Conversations from a Domestic's Life (1956), Mildred, the main character, is a sassy, defiant day worker who fights for civil rights and human dignity, and who refuses to be degraded because her work is what others would consider menial. Childress says the character of Mildred was based on her Aunt Lorraine, who worked as a domestic for many years and who consistently "refused to exchange dignity for pay." Childress's life and the thematic philosophy which guides her writings may also be summed up as a refusal to exchange dignity for pay. Childress has always spoken out for accurate portrayals of black life and characters in the theater, and she has continued to write of black life and issues in her fiction when others would have perhaps preferred that she be quiet. Like Cora James Anderson Green in A Short Walk (1979), she...