message, the others obeyed. I was slow to grasp that my entry into that dull and hypocritical space where first grade happened was my formal exposure to southern racial and sexual politics. In that school room, no such Never Never land as my alley could exist. There, everything was black or white, and I was definitely white.
As a child, I came into contact with two black women, both of whom worked for my family as domestic servants: Hettie Holmes and Josephine Zeak. Mamie took an interest in Hettie’s welfare, giving her old clothes and food to take home to Mr. Holmes. As a child who loved to choose for myself, I wondered if Hettie might not prefer money to go downtown and buy something new.
On several occasions, Mamie sent Daddy to the local jail on Sunday mornings to bail Hettie out. Hettie, my mother told me, drank whiskey on the weekend and fought with her husband, who drank whiskey all week. Their weapons were knives, and Hettie came to work more than once with new cut marks on her neck and upper arms, though never on her powerful and beautiful face. I imagined Mr. Holmes agreed with me about her face. Once, when I raged against him for hurting her, she said laughingly: “Oh, sugar, you should see him, he looks a whole lot worse.” They stayed married all the time I knew her.
Hettie was short, dark skinned, and pudgy, wore faded house-dresses, and cleaned our house in bare feet. But to me at three and five, she seemed mysterious, warm, and free spirited. She dipped Red Devil snuff from little flat aluminum cans. Wanting to do everything she did, one morning I asked her to let me have some snuff. “No, child, this’ll make you some sick.” I insisted, putting Hettie into an ancient black-white tug in which a child of five can order a grown woman to do her bidding. I won, of course, and took a small pinch of the rich brown smelly stuff. Sticking it carefully between my gum and lower lip, I tried hard to copy my model. In about three minutes, I felt lightheaded, then nauseated for the rest of the morning. After that I was content to watch my hero fill her own lower lip until it stuck out bravely.
Hettie Holmes cooked things my mother did not know how to fix. Her corn bread—crisp and delicate all at once—tasted so good I ate it without butter or jelly. Her version of pork chops and onions had a succulence and pungency that spoiled me for all future offerings of that popular southern dish. Hettie could serve peas and beans that still tasted of peas and beans, unlike my mother’s, which had no particular taste because they were disguised in a thick French sauce.
My mother prepared haute cuisine when I wanted greasy vegetables from a frying pan. The frying pan urge obsessed me for months. Hettie made our lunch and served it in the dining room where we always ate. Then she had her own food at a table in the kitchen, carefully placed so Mamie could see and talk with her. Mamie enjoyed Hettie’s company but could not conceive in 1943 of their eating in the same physical space. Hettie took the cast-iron pan from which our food had just been served, set it on a dish towel on her table, and ate directly from it. When she had eaten all she could with a fork, she took a piece of bread and sopped up remaining traces of gravy or “pot licker.” I was punished severely for using my bread that way.
Whenever Mamie went to town to shop or attend her many clubs (garden, book, church auxiliary, forensic, library), I lunched out of that frying pan, sitting proudly at the kitchen table. Hettie, on the other hand, watched and listened nervously for Mamie’s possible untimely return. At least once, we were almost caught. I was in the middle of pork chops and onions, peas, and corn bread, when Mamie rang the door bell at the front screen door. While Hettie kept my mother at bay with some story about her hands being in dishwater, I dumped my food onto a china plate and ran for the dining room. When I first saw Lillian Smith’s title, Strange Fruit, I recalled those stolen childhood lunches at which I could relax about whether I was using the correct implement or putting my glass back at the right angle in relation to my knife and plate.
In Alabama, torrential downpours can drop inches of rain in a very short time. We lived on the plateau of a high hillside that had been terraced for housing. Houses across the street had many cement steps going from the street up to their front porches, while our front entrance was on the street level. When it rained hard, the water surged down those stone steps into our yard before it ran down the hill toward our back alley. I was scared of those sheets of water. If a storm began on an afternoon when Hettie was keeping me, she stopped whatever she was doing to stand beside me at the living room window. I was fixed in amazement at the deluge of clay-colored water washing down, making creases in all the lawns, noisy even through our closed windows, bringing small objects with it. Standing behind me, her hand resting reassuringly on my back, Hettie would talk in her low, husky voice: “God’s making soup out of rain for his people and what you see washing down the steps is his pots boiling over, like mine do in the kitchen if I go off and forget them.” She told me the trees were not going to blow over but were yawning to wake up and feel the wind blow through them. She told me lightning was a message from the Lord telling us to work harder and look especially to our housekeeping. She told me thunder was Jesus in his private bowling alley, knocking over ten golden pins, having fun for a change.
Hettie Holmes stopped working for us when I was about nine, and I never heard of her again. When I asked why she was not coming to work, I received no answer. I was angry and hurt to have so central a person removed from my daily life without a word of explanation. Maybe she became more alcoholic and could not work a steady job; maybe Daddy stopped being willing to bail her out of jail; maybe she cooked up one mess too many of greasy magic peas and corn bread for Mamie’s ego. Maybe she got tired of being grateful to Mamie for handouts. Or maybe she secretly resented being bailed out of jail by my father. I made up lots of maybes. But none of them took away my ache or filled the void I felt when Hettie vanished. She is surely long dead but I think of her sometimes when it storms or when I eat black-eyed peas that never quite taste right.
Shortly after Hettie Holmes stopped working for us, we heard about a young black woman reputed to be good at cleaning and ironing. She arrived one day in 1947 and stayed until we sold the house in 1964 after Mamie died. Josephine Zeak was her name, and I liked her right away. I had never known a person whose name began with “z.” Josephine was tall and thin with cocoa brown skin and shiny straightened black hair. Her nose was Western, her cheek bones were statuesque African. She wore stockings and spoke softly. Her dresses had belts. She used a napkin when she ate her lunch and read magazines while her food digested. It was a major source of irritation to my mother and sister that Josephine would not hop up from lunch to scrub the kitchen floor or at least wash the lunch dishes. She insisted on half an hour between her last mouthful and any resumption of work, so that her food could digest properly. I remember Mamie getting up from her lunch, returning to her knees to finish polishing a part of the floor between the living and dining rooms that got waxed once a week and was hazardous to walk on. While she did that, Josephine waited for her hamburger patty to settle, reading to my mother from Life magazine about some movie actor they both liked. She refused to wash curtains, wax floors, or iron with starch, leaving those odious tasks for my mother.
When Josephine arrived, I thought myself old enough to take some responsibility in training her. Dusting and vacuuming were my specialities, so I “taught” her to do those things. She was canny enough to mask her feelings, never letting on that she already knew how to do such chores all too well. In her early thirties when I met her, she had been cleaning houses since she was a teenager. Whereas Hettie Holmes had come every day unless she was too hung over or in jail, Josephine stipulated which three days a week she could come and what her hours would be. Because Mamie had never dealt with a black person who was not completely deferential, she was speechless. All she could do was complain to Betty about Josephine’s “insolence” and how that was probably tied to her being light skinned. Neither of them considered firing or confronting her.
Sometimes Josephine and I cleaned the bedrooms together so she would have time to iron in the afternoons. Those were good times for me because I went into the basement where the ironing board stayed and talked to Josephine. I learned about her two daughters and soon met Joann, who was only three or four months older than I. Our talks about school subjects and dating seemed stiff to me. Joann was dating and I was not, so I felt inferior when that topic came up. But when we talked about anything else, she hung back, trying to show what her mother undoubtedly would have taught her was appropriate deference. We graduated from high school the same year, and that next fall she married a soldier named