It’s been two months now since I became a maid.

In 1962 Françoise Ega, a Martinican woman working odd jobs and raising five children in Marseille, stumbled upon a newspaper article about Carolina Maria de Jesus, a Black Brazilian woman who, “hunched over” in a favela and using “pieces of paper that [she] found in the trash,” wrote a highly acclaimed memoir, Quarto de despejo, that would go on to be an enormous bestseller. Inspired by this fellow Black woman’s diary and her insistence on documenting her experiences by any means, Ega resolved to pursue her dream of becoming a writer.

Over the next decade she wrote three books. The only one to be published in her lifetime was Le temps des Madras, a coming-of-age story about a young girl growing up in Morne-Rouge, Martinique, in the 1920s. A second novel, L’alizé ne soufflait plus, which follows Martinican soldiers fighting for France in World War II, was published posthumously after her death at fifty-five, as was her diary, Notes to a Black Woman. Written in epistolary form as unsent letters to Carolina Maria de Jesus, Notes was motivated by an expressly political impulse. Ega was a trained typist and able to secure various jobs to supplement her husband’s income, but after she witnessed the discrimination her fellow migrant women encountered while employed in the homes of Marseille’s white families, she took jobs as a cleaning lady to document the exploitation and dehumanization that domestic workers faced. When she felt discouraged—ridiculed by her husband, exhausted by her children, worn out by her labor for women who delighted in demeaning her—she would think of Carolina and take up her pen.

The resulting book, from which the following selections are drawn, foreshadows the activism to which Ega would dedicate herself later in life, including founding organizations to improve the lives of Antillean migrants—from after-school programs for kids to adult literacy lessons—and helping to create the Espace Culturel Busserine, her neighborhood’s first community center, which is still active today. Notes to a Black Woman is a portrait of one woman’s revolt in the face of the racist and patriarchal forces that affect us all.

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Emma Ramadan et Françoise Ega, The New York Review, 10 février 2026.

Illustration: Natasha Muluswela, If You Don’t Work, You Don’t Eat, 2021