“I ain’t eaten all day, when can I have my cake?”
“Don’t say ain’t, you speak properly now. I didn’t raise you to talk like a mule.”
First day at my White Lady’s house, I ate my ham sandwich in the kitchen, put my plate up in my spot in the cupboard. When that little brat stole my pocketbook and hid it in the oven, I didn’t whoop her on the behind.
But when the White Lady said: “Now I want you to be sure and handwash all the clothes first, then put them in the electric machine to finish up.”
I said: “Why I got to handwash when the power washer gone do the job? That’s the biggest waste a time I ever heard of.”
That White Lady smiled at me, and five minutes later, I was out on the street.
Working for Miss Celia, I’ll get to see my kids off to Spann Elementary in the morning and still get home in the evening with time to myself. I haven’t had a nap since Kindra was born in 1957, but with these hours – eight to three – I could have one every day if that was my idea of a fine time. Since no bus goes all the way out to Miss Celia’s, I have to take Leroy’s car.
“You ain’t taking my car every day, woman, what if I get the day shift and need to —”
“She paying me seventy dollars cash every Friday, Leroy.”
“Maybe I take Sugar’s bike.”
On Tuesday, the day after the interview, I park the car down the street from Miss Celia’s house, around a curve so you can’t see it. I walk fast on the empty road and up the drive. No other cars come by.
“I’m here, Miss Celia.” I stick my head in her bedroom that first morning and there she is, propped up on the covers with her makeup perfect and her tight Friday-night clothes on even though it’s Tuesday, reading the trash in the Hollywood Digest like it’s the Holy B[31].
“Good morning, Minny! It’s real good to see you,” she says, and I bristle, hearing a white lady being so friendly.
I look around the bedroom, sizing up the job. It’s big, with cream-colored carpet, a yellow king canopy bed, two fat yellow chairs. And it’s neat, with no clothes on the floor. The spread’s made up underneath her. The blanket on the chair’s folded nice. But I watch, I look. I can feel it. Something’s wrong.
“When can we get to our first cooking lesson?” she asks. “Can we start today?”
“I reckon in a few days, after you go to the store and pick up what we need.”
She thinks about this a second, says, “Maybe you ought to go, Minny, since you know what to buy and all.”
I look at her. Most white women like to do their own shopping. “Alright, I go in the morning, then.”
I spot a small pink shag rug she’s put on top of the carpet next to the bathroom door. Kind of catty-cornered. I’m no decorator, but I know a pink rug doesn’t match a yellow room.
“Miss Celia, fore I get going here, I need to know. Exactly when you planning on telling Mister Johnny bout me?”
She eyes the magazine in her lap. “In a few months, I reckon. I ought to know how to cook and stuff by then.”
“By a few, is you meaning two?”
She bites her lipsticky lips. “I was thinking more like… four.”
Say what? I’m not working four months like an escaped criminal. “You ain’t gone tell him till 1963? No ma’am, before Christmas.”
She sighs. “Alright. But right before.”
I do some figuring. “That’s a hundred and… sixteen days then. You gone tell him. A hundred and sixteen days from now.”
She gives me a worried frown. I guess she didn’t expect the maid to be so good at math. Finally she says, “Okay.”
Then I tell her she needs to go on in the living room, let me do my work in here. When she’s gone, I eyeball the room, at how neat it all looks. Real slow, I open her closet and just like I thought, forty-five things fall down on my head. Then I look under the bed and find enough dirty clothes to where I bet she’s hasn’t washed in months.
Every drawer is a wreck, every hidden cranny full of dirty clothes and wadded-up stockings. I find fifteen boxes of new shirts for Mister Johnny so he won’t know she can’t wash and iron. Finally, I lift up that funny-looking pink shag rug. Underneath, there’s a big, deep stain the color of rust. I shudder.
That afternoon, Miss Celia and I make a list of what to cook that week, and the next morning I do the grocery shopping. But it takes me twice as long because I have to drive all the way to the white Jitney Jungle in town instead of the colored Piggly Wiggly by me since I figure she won’t eat food from a colored grocery store and I reckon I don’t blame her, with the potatoes having inch-long eyes and the milk almost sour. When I get to work, I’m ready to fight with her over all the reasons I’m late, but there Miss Celia is on the bed like before, smiling like it doesn’t matter. All dressed up and going nowhere. For five hours she sits there, reading the magazines. The only time I see her get up is for a glass of milk or to pee. But I don’t ask. I’m just the maid.
After I clean the kitchen, I go in the formal living room. I stop in the doorway and give that grizzly bear a good long stare. He’s seven feet tall and baring his teeth. His claws are long, curled, witchy-looking. At his feet lays a bone-handled hunting knife. I get closer and see his fur’s nappy with dust. There’s a cobweb between his jaws.
First, I swat at the dust with my broom, but it’s thick, matted up in his fur. All this does is move the dust around. So I take a cloth and try and wipe him down, but I squawk every time that wiry hair touches my hand. White people. I mean, I have cleaned everything from refrigerators to rear ends but what makes that lady think I know how to clean a damn grizzly bear?
I go get the Hoover. I suck the dirt off and except for a few spots where I sucked too hard and thinned him, I think it worked out pretty good.
After I’m done with the bear, I dust the fancy books nobody reads, the Confederate coat buttons, the silver pistol. On a table is a gold picture frame of Miss Celia and Mister Johnny at the altar and I look close to see what kind of man he is. I’m hoping he’s fat and short-legged in case it comes to running, but he’s not anywhere close. He’s strong, tall, thick. And he’s no stranger either. Lord. He’s the one who went steady with Miss Hilly all those years when I first worked for Miss Walters. I never met him, but I saw him enough times to be sure. I shiver, my fears tripling. Because that alone says more about that man than anything.
At one o’clock, Miss Celia comes in the kitchen and says she’s ready for her first cooking lesson. She settles on a stool. She’s wearing a tight red sweater and a red skirt and enough makeup to scare a hooker[32].
“What you know how to cook already?” I ask.
She thinks this over, wrinkling her forehead. “Maybe we could just start at the beginning.”
“Must be something you know. What your mama teach you growing up?”
She looks down at the webby feet of her stockings, says, “I can cook corn pone.”
I can’t help but laugh. “What else you know how to do sides corn pone?”
“I can boil potatoes.” Her voice drops even quieter. “And I can do grits. We didn’t have electric current out where I lived. But I’m ready to learn right. On a real stovetop.”
Lord. I’ve never met a white person worse off than me except for crazy Mister Wally, lives behind the Canton feed store and eats the cat food.
“You been feeding your husband grits and corn pone