Drawing on research into the white South Africa migration from apartheid South Africa prior to 1990, this article explores the legacy of the racialized and gendered patterns of attachment and separation embedded within the triadic relationships among employer, domestic worker, and the child being cared for. It suggests that where the distinction between the personal and political is blurred to the extent that citizens are deemed responsible for practices that do not fit the image they wish to construct for themselves, the environment offers a less contested site of identification. The author concludes that underlying such migratory rationales as economics, physical safety, and political protest is the subjugated desire to distance from responsibility for racialization, a desire signified by the memory and reconstruction of early family-domestic worker relationships.