When my mother was pregnant with me, she was working at Dixieland, a diner just off Highway 78 in Dallas. I was in my 20s and she was just out of college, but she’d been working there since she was 17, and she looked just like her picture on the wall. In the back she had a job that paid $125 a week, a job she’d had her whole life. It was a tough job for a poor woman, but she had a friend who helped her keep it and was her boss. One day my mother looked at the picture on the wall and then at me. “If I knew then what I know now,” she told me, “I’d quit.”

What she’d known then was that she was working a job for $125 a week that paid $35,800 a year for a woman whose name was on the wall. That was more money than my father made,