One woman liked me for it. She had two little girls, seven and five. I was hired as an upstairs maid. For two or three days things went on very well. The president of the kitchen was a fat, black old woman who had nursed the master of the house and was a fixture. Nobody is so powerful in a southern family as one of these family fixtures. No matter who hires you, the fixture can fire you. They roam all over the house bossing everybody from the boss on down. Nobody must upset Cynthia or Rhoda or Beckey. If you can’t get along with the house president you can’t keep the job.
And Miz Cally was President in Full in this house. She looked at me cut-eye first thing because the madam had hired me without asking her about it. She went into her grumble just as soon as I stuck my head in the kitchen door. She looked at me for a moment with her hands on her hips and burst out, “Lawd a’mercy! Miz Alice must done took you to raise! She don’t need no more young’uns round de place. Dis house needs a woman to give aid and assistance.”
She showed her further disapproval by vetoing every move I made. She was to show me where to find the aprons, and she did. Just as soon as I pulled open the drawer, she bustled me right away from it with her hips.
“Don’t you go pulling and hauling through my drawers! I keeps things in they place. You take de apron I give you and git on up dem stairs.”
I didn’t get mad with her. I took the apron and put it on with quite a bit of editing by Sister Cally, and went on up the back stairs. As I emerged on the upper floor, two pairs of gray-blue eyes were ranged on me.
“Hello!” said the two little girls in chorus.
“Hello!” I answered back.
“You going to work for us?” the taller one asked, and fell in beside me.
“Yeah.” Maybe I cracked a smile or something, for both of them took a hand on either side and we went on into the room where Mrs. Alice was waiting for me to show me what to do and how to do it.
She was a very beautiful woman in her middle twenties, and she was combing out her magnificent hair. She looked at me through the looking glass, and we both started to grinning for some reason or another.
She showed me how to make beds and clean up. There were three rooms up there, but she told me not to try to do too much at a time. Just keep things looking sort of neat. Then she dressed and left the house. I got things straightened out with Helen and Genevieve acting as convoy at every step. Things went all right till I got to the bathroom, then somehow or other we three found ourselves in a tussle. Screaming, laughing, splashing water and tussling, when a dark shadow filled up the door. Heinz could have wrung enough vinegar out of Cally’s look to run his pickle works.
“You going ’way from here!” she prophesied, and shook her head so vigorously that her head rag wagged. She was going to get me gone from there!
“No!” screamed Helen, the littlest girl, and held on to me.
“No! No! No!” Genevieve shrieked.
“Humph! You just wait till yo’ daddy come home!” Cally gloomed. “I ain’t never seen no sich caper like dis since I been borned in dis world.” Then she stumped on back downstairs.
“Don’t you go,” Genevieve begged. “I like you.”
“Me too, I like you too,” Helen chorused. “If you go home, we’ll go with you.”
I had to wait on the table at dinner that night, with my apron too long for me. Mrs. Alice and the children were giving a glowing account of me. The boss glanced at me tolerantly a time or two. Helen would grab hold of my clothes every time I passed her chair, and play in the vegetable dishes when I offered them to her, until her father threatened to spank her hands, but he looked up at me and smiled a little. He looked to me like an aged old soul of thirty-five or so.
Cally kept on cracking the kitchen door to see how I was getting along in there, and I suspect to give the boss a view of her disapproving face.
Things rocked on for a week or two. Mrs. Alice went out more and more to bridge clubs and things like that. She didn’t care whether I made up the rooms or not so long as the children were entertained. She would come in late in the afternoon and tell Cally to run upstairs and straighten up a bit.
“What’s dat gal been doing?” Cally would growl. Dat gal she was talking about had been off to the park with the children, or stretched out on the floor telling stories or reading aloud from some of their story books. Their mother had been free to go about her business, and a good time was had by all—except Cally.
Before a month passed, things came to a head: Cally burst into the dining room one night and flew all over the place. The boss had to get somebody to do his cooking. She was tired of doing all the work. She just wasn’t going to cook and look after things downstairs and then troop upstairs and do the work somebody else was getting paid for. She was old. Her joints hurt her so bad till she couldn’t rest of nights. They really needed to get somebody to help.
Mrs. Alice sat there stark, still and quiet. The boss looked at her, then at old Cally, and then at me.
Finally, he said, “I never meant for you to work yourself down like that, Aunt Cally. You’ve done more than your share.”
“’Deed, Gawd knows I is!” Cally agreed belligerently, rolling her white eyeballs in my direction.
“Isn’t Zora taking care of the upstairs? I thought that was what she was hired for,” the boss asked, and looked at his wife.
“Taking care of what?” Cally snorted. “’Deed, I ain’t lying, Mr. Ed. I wouldn’t tell a lie on nobody—”
“I know you wouldn’t, Auntie,” he soothed.
“Dat gal don’t do a living thing round dis house but play all day long wid these young ’uns. Den I has to scuffle up dem stairs and do round, cause effen I didn’t, dis here place would be like a hawg-pen. Dat’s what it would. I has to go and do it, Mr. Ed, else it wouldn’t never git done. And I’m sick and tired. I’m gwine ’way from here!”
“Naw, Cally, you can’t do it. You been with me all my life, and I don’t aim to let you go. Zora will have to go. These children are too big now to need a nurse.”
What did he say that for? My public went into sound and action. Mrs. Alice was letting a tear or two slip. Otherwise she was as still as stone. But Helen scrambled out of her chair with her jaws latched back to the last notch. She stumbled up against me and swung on. Genevieve screamed “No!” in a regular chant like a cheer leader, and ran to me, too. Their mother never raised her head. The boss turned to her.
“Darling, why don’t you quiet these children?” he asked gently.
“No! No! No! Zora can’t go!” my cheering squad yelled, slinging tears right and left.
“Shut up!” the boss grated at the children and put his hand on the table and scuffled his feet as if he meant to rush off for the hair brush. “I’ll be on you in one more minute! Hush!”
It was easy to see that his heart was not in any spanking. His frown was not right for it. The yelling kept right on. Cally flounced on back to the kitchen, and he got up and hauled the children upstairs. In a minute he called his wife and shut the bedroom door.
I cleared off the table, and when I sat down in the kitchen to eat, Cally slammed a plate in front of me with some dried-up fried eggs left from breakfast. She put the steak away in the ice-box ostentatiously, just daring me with her eyes to cheep about it. I kept good and quiet.
In about a half hour the boss came down and talked to Cally. I was to stay on and look after the children. His wife was going to look around for a woman to take care of the upstairs and the front of the house, too. Cally would have less to do. He sort of apologized when he said the children were so attached to me that he hated to get rid of me on their account. Not once did he say a word to me. So Cally was mollified to an extent. If she had not gotten rid of me, her rank had been recognized at any rate. That was what she was fighting for anyway. He told her to go down to a certain shoe store the next day and tell them to let her have some more comfortable shoes and send the bill to him. Then he went back upstairs very quietly. Cally talked to
me then, and gave me a piece of pie.
But that was not the end. I could sense that my being there was doing something to that house. There were looks between husband and wife at times. He was not satisfied, and it was not the two dollars a week I was getting. He was not mean to me, he just acted funny. His wife was as good as gold. She made me a white dress herself and bought me a Sunday hat. She would go out to her bridge clubs and things like that, but she was usually home before he got there. Sometimes she would be home before the children and I got home from our prowls. And how we did prowl! Then the boss took to coming home at odd hours and going in the kitchen and talking to Cally for a long time.
One evening he just fired me suddenly after the children had been put to bed. I hated it, because I was having all the fun in the world. He had followed me down to the foot of the stairs. While he was paying me off, Mrs. Alice came out of her room and stood at the top of the stairs.
“Ed,” she began.
“Now, you go on back in your room, Alice; I’m handling this. Go on! You don’t need Zora to take care of those children. She is not going to be here another day. I mean that.”
He saw me out of the door, and I went off feeling sad. I didn’t know what he was firing me for. The children were more than satisfied with my company. His wife seemed very glad to have me around. I couldn’t see what was wrong.
Years later when I had seen more, I concluded that he was jealous of his wife. He was not one of those pretty men, and she was a beautiful thing, much younger than he was. I do not think that she ever did anything wrong, but he felt insecure. If she had to be around to keep up with the children, she had her hands full. There was much less danger of her wandering off. Cally was in his confidence. I am certain that he got full reports on his wife’s goings and comings. He loved his wife dearly, and he was afraid his miracle might fade. She had told me herself that she had married at seventeen. She was certainly a lovely, soft-looking thing. She never wore the things people didn’t want to look at, and she did wear things you always wanted to see, and she had an easy kind of sweet smell. A lot of men would have taken over the job of worrying with her at the drop of a hat.
Well, then, I didn’t have a job any more. I didn’t have money either, but I had bought a pair of shoes.
But I was lucky in a way. Somebody told the woman I was staying with about another job, so I went to see about it, and the lady took me. She was sick in the bed, and she had a little girl three years old, but this child did not shine like Helen and Genevieve. She was sort of old-looking in the face.
I didn’t like that house. It frowned at me just as soon as I crossed the door-sill. It was a big house with plenty of things in it but the rooms just sat across the hall from each other and made gloomy faces back and forth.
The sick lady was named Mrs. Moncrief, and she had two older sisters who had never been married, and they gloomed. The cook was an old family relic on the female side and she was out of the habit of smiling, too.
Mr. Moncrief used to laugh, but not around the house, and it was no good laugh when he did it. The reason I knew was, about a week after I joined up, he took to waylaying me down the street a piece and walking with me. It made me feel very uncomfortable for him to do that. I didn’t see what he wanted to do it for anyway. It was not long before he told me he was sick and tired of that house full of sour-looking women. He was sick of the town and everything in it. He was selling out his business and going away. He would take me to Canada with him if I wanted to go, and if I had any sense I would jump at the chance.
I kept telling him I didn’t want to go. I did want to go some place else, but not with him. It sounded grand if he would just pay my way up there and he go some place else. His belly laid all over his belt, and he was so chuckle-headed that you couldn’t see his collar. But he didn’t seem to have but one ear, and it couldn’t hear a thing but ‘yes’.
So every morning, I hated to go back to that house, but I hated more to go home at night.
Finally, I got over being timid of his being the boss and just told him not to bother me. He laughed at that. Then I said that I would tell his wife, and he laughed again. The very next night he was waiting for me.
So I went in and told his wife to make him stop waylaying me. I did not tell her about Canada. I needn’t worry about that. I just wanted him to stop making me feel shame by walking along with me. People might talk.
Right then I learned a lesson to carry with me through life. I’ll never tell another wife. She laid there a long time and said nothing, then she tried to smile as if it were a joke that was mildly funny. Then she began to cry without moving anything in her face. It was terrible to look at, and I wanted to run out of there and hide and never let anybody see me again. But it was hard to move my feet. So I began to cry, too. She shook her head and said, “You have nothing to cry about, Zora. You haven’t been lying here for three years with somebody hoping to find you dead every morning. You don’t know what it means for every girl who comes in hailing distance to be mixed up in your life. You don’t know what it means to give birth to a child for your husband and find that your health is gone the day the baby is born and for him not to care what becomes of the baby or you either. God! Why couldn’t he leave you alone?”
I saw her fumbling for the glass of water on the bed-table, so I handed it to her and ran out of the house. I felt lower than sea-bottom. I ran off so that I could cry alone. I never meant to foot that house again, nor to see anybody who lived in it.
But the next day around nine o’clock he drove up to where I lived.
“So you told on me, did you?” He opened right up and I thought that he was going to kill me then and there.
“I told you if you didn’t leave me alone I was going to tell,” I quavered.
“Oh, that is all right, girlie. She’s not my boss. She hasn’t a thing to do with our business. It’s you and me going to Canada, not that old maid I married by mistake. When can you be ready?”
That was too much. He was not even listening to what I had to say. I gave up and told him I could be ready on Saturday.
“That’s three days off,” he objected. “You can’t have all that getting-ready to do. How about tomorrow night?”
“Well, all right, tomorrow night,” I lied.
“Meet me at the station. You don’t need your clothes. I’ll buy you something decent to wear on the way. Just be there. Nope, you better stay here. I’ll come get you. Don’t you fool me, now. Just be there. I’m not the kind of a man that stands for no fooling. I’m not the kind of man to be worried with so much responsibilities. Never should have let myself get married in the first place. All I need is a young, full-of-feelings girl to sleep with and enjoy life. I always did keep me a colored girl. My last one moved off to Chicago and sort of left me without. I want a colored girl and I’m giving you the preference.”
He went on down the steps and I ran inside to pack up my few things. In an hour I had moved. He came for me the next night, I was told, and tried to search the house to see if the landlady had tried to block him by telling a lie. He could not conceive of my not wanting to go with him.
Two weeks later it was in the papers that he had taken all of his own money that he could get his hands on and some other people’s money, and had vanished. Nobody seemed to know which way he went. The Black Dispatch (Negro grapevine) reported that the colored office girl of a well-known white doctor had gone with him.
I never tried to give any information. I felt that my big mouth had worked overtime as it was. I never even went back to get my pay.
I was out of a job again. I got out of many more. Sometimes I didn’t suit the people. Sometimes the people didn’t suit me. Sometimes my insides tortured me so that I was restless and unstable. I just was not the type. I was doing none of the things I wanted to do. I had to do numerous uninteresting things I did not want to do, and it was tearing me to pieces.
I wanted family love and peace and a resting place. I wanted books a
nd school. When I saw more fortunate people of my own age on their way to and from school, I would cry inside and be depressed for days, until I learned how to mash down on my feelings and numb them for a spell. I felt crowded in on, and hope was beginning to waver.
The third vision of aimless wandering was on me as I had seen it. My brother Dick had married and sent for me to come to Sanford and stay with him. I got hopeful for school again. He sent me a ticket, and I went. I didn’t want to go, though. As soon as I got back to Sanford, my father ordered me to stay at his house.
It was no more than a month after I got there before my stepmother and I had our fight.
I found my father a changed person. The bounce was gone from the man. The wreck of his home and the public reaction to it was telling on him. In spite of all, I was sorry for him and that added to my resentment towards his wife.
In all fairness to her, she probably did the best she could, according to her lights. It was just tragic that her light was so poor. A little more sense would have told her that the time and manner of her marriage to my father had killed any hope of success from the start. No warning bell inside of her caused her to question the wisdom of an arrangement made over so many fundamental stumbling stones. My father certainly could not see the consequences, for he had never had to consider them too seriously. Mama had always been there to do that. Suddenly he must have realized with inward terror that Lucy was not there any more. This was not just another escapade which Mama would maul his knit for in private and smooth out publicly. It had rushed him along to where he did not want to go already and the end was not in sight. This new wife had wormed her way out of her little crack in the world to become what looked to her like a great lady, and the big river was too much for her craft. Instead of the world dipping the knee to the new-made Mrs. Reverend, they were spitting on her intentions and calling her a storm-buzzard. Certainly if my father had not built up a strong following years before, he could not have lasted three months. As it was, his foundations rotted from under him, and seven years saw him wrecked. He did not defend her and establish her. It might have been because he was not the kind of a man who could live without his friends, and his old friends, male and female, were the very ones who were leading the attack to disestablish her. Then, too, a certain amount of the prestige every wife enjoys arises out of where the man got her from and how. She lacked the comfort of these bulwarks too. She must have decided that if she could destroy his children she would be safe, but the opposite course would have been the only extenuating circumstance in the eyes of the public. The failure of the project would have been obvious in a few months or even weeks if Papa had been the kind of man to meet the conflict with courage. As it was, the misery of the situation continued for years. He was dragging around like a stepped-on worm. My brief appearance on the scene acted like a catalyzer. A few more months and the thing fell to pieces for good.