in the basement Josephine shared a dream with me: she was determined to help her girls advance themselves, so they would not have to clean houses.
Sometimes I read to Josephine while she ironed, and then we discussed what I had read. As I grew older, I realized how unfair it was for anyone so intelligent to have to clean white ladies’ houses in order to make money. Many years after she came to work for us, I asked her about all this, and she said, “I once thought of being something, but then I married and had the babies and it did not seem very practical to try. It was easy to get work cleaning houses. White ladies liked me to do that but didn’t particularly want me to do other things.”
Since my exodus from the South in 1961, my contact with Josephine has been mostly through our monthly letters. Hers are full of the weather, her health, her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, the white ladies she has worked for, her hopes that I am well and happy. When I went to Wisconsin to graduate school and her older daughter went to Alaska with her army husband, Josephine said she felt lonely and less useful. But on one occasion, she was more helpful to me than either of us understood at the time. I was in the process of writing my Ph.D. dissertation. My mother and sister had just spent the summer with me in Madison, Wisconsin, and I could see that Mamie was not well and that Betty was discontented. That fall, just months before my mother died of a heart attack, Josephine called me long distance (a huge cost to her) to say she was worried about “Miss Mamie.” Under strenuous questioning, she revealed that Betty was pushing harder than usual to leave Holly Court. My sister had wanted to move across town to a better neighborhood for years. My mother flatly refused—perhaps that was the only time she refused my sister. She owned her house; it was her only security; she liked having Betty and her husband live with her. To reverse that arrangement would mean a loss of power. As Josephine talked with me, she cried, saying, “Oh, Toni, I’m scared for Miss Mamie.” I sat right down and wrote my mother immediately, supporting her wish to stay where she felt more secure. Josephine had taken a great risk to speak so directly to me.
Though I have never told Josephine in so many words that I am a lesbian, she has known about several women with whom I have lived. She has accepted this part of me as easily as she did my telling her at ten how to vacuum. She sends greetings to my present lover, remembers her name, is happy that I am not living alone. Each time I have moved, she has written to say, “Wish I could come help clean so your space will be fit to live in.” Statements like this one are followed by, “Smile,” written in parentheses. Her sense of humor continues to touch me as does her determination to grow old gracefully. A few years ago she moved away from her husband, Mr. Zeak (she never called him anything else in front of me). She wrote me that things had not been so good between them, and she had decided to live more peacefully in her old age. Now she rents an apartment in the same building as her sister. Her income gets smaller every year since housecleaning has become too strenuous. Though she worked hard for over fifty years, she has no pension and virtually no Social Security. Her daughters help her out financially, and my sister and I send her money occasionally, which she calls a “token.” When I see the word, I feel that no amount we ever send can make up for the years of cheap labor she gave us. Her meaning for the word is that my sister or I have sent her another sign of how much we value and care for her.
On a trip south in 1974, I looked forward most of all to seeing Josephine. She invited me to her house for lunch, and I accepted gladly. The psychosomatic laryngitis I had developed shortly after my uncle had greeted me with, “God made them niggers black, you know,” magically vanished as I crossed Josephine’s threshold. Her space was safe space, a place where I could speak without fear of offending. The decorations in her house were a strange blend of simple furniture and linoleum on the floors and exquisite ornaments from our house on Holly Court, given to her first by Mamie and then by Betty after Mamie’s death.
We were to have lunch in the kitchen so I stood and talked with her while she fixed things. She had remembered my favorite lunch: Campbell’s tomato soup and a hamburger made of ground round steak on bread with mayonnaise and catsup. I cried while Josephine stirred my soup; no one else that trip seemed to focus on me at all, preferring to make me into who or what they expected. Maybe that was part of why I always loved the women who worked for us so fiercely and was so devastated when they vanished: they gave me sympathy, kindness, and affectionate acceptance without being able to demand anything in return.
When I noticed that Josephine was cooking only one hamburger patty, I asked why. “Oh, I ate my lunch before you came, so I could listen better to all you have to say.” Then I noticed only one place setting at the table. “Oh, I’ll just stand here by the stove, in case you want something more; then when you finish, we can go into the living room and have a nice talk.” I felt wounded for both of us and insisted that she sit with me while I ate.
I decided to ask her about being black in Fairfield, Alabama, and she decided to tell me. She spoke with tears in her eyes about Dr. King and his vision. She spoke with fear in her eyes about young blacks, especially men, out of jobs, restless, eager to act violently toward anyone in their way. She admitted that it had made her angry to be treated badly by white ladies and hurt her not to be able to give her children more of what she wished for them. I told her I was in favor of total integration. She replied, “Oh, child, I’m too old and grew up a long time ago; if we go that far, it’s just more hurt and blood for us here.” Her worst terror was that, as some blacks rebelled, all would be punished. So she preferred moderation, a slower pace. From my position of white safety, I told her the pace was killingly slow now and that I wanted change within my lifetime.
After a couple of hours, Josephine began noticeably to fidget. When I asked, she admitted, “I’m a little worried about how long you’ve been here. My neighbors are sure to have seen the car when it drove up; they’ll know it held a white lady.” I had stayed longer than any errand could have possibly taken and so must not be an employer. Recently a “nice colored lady” from her church had been slapped around by young black boys because she had been seen being too friendly with some white person at a grocery store on Fairfield’s main street. Josephine was frightened and yet sad to have to wish me gone. I asked her to come outside and let me take a picture of her, which she did. I could get her to do this, against her better judgment, because the basic power imbalance between us was still present. Having hugged in her kitchen, I was careful not to appear too close or to touch her. It felt entirely too familiar to me, holding in spontaneous affection for a woman I love.
For many years, Josephine sent me a homemade pound cake at Christmas. That meant laying in eggs, sugar, flour, butter, vanilla, ingredients alone at a cost of about eight dollars. Josephine made five dollars a day, cleaning houses. To make my cake, she took a day off, losing her much-needed money, in order to sift, mash, and beat by hand. Then she went to elaborate lengths to wrap my cake so it would hold its freshness through the U.S. mail. It came in a cardboard box, mailed first class, marked fragile, handle with care—expensive. Inside the big box was a bakery box secured into the heavier one by layers of grocery store brown bags. These would have cost her as well, since stores gave free extra bags only to whites. Inside the boxes lay the cake, made in a doughnut hole pan, even more delicate than if it were solid. The cake was wrapped first in waxed paper, then aluminum foil, then paper toweling. Each material was folded with utmost attention to closing out any air that could dry the texture. Wads of paper towels were gently stuffed into the center, so the form arrived intact. Tissue paper wrapped the bakery box, holding it firmly yet softly in its container. Every year when it came, I cried: all that time and love and sacrifice for me. I was possessive about my cake, unwilling to share it even with lovers. Several years ago, I gave up sugar but could not bring myself to tell Josephine for a long time afterward. I liked feeling that taken care of. I still miss my package.
Hettie and Josephine filled that peculiarly southern role of black mothers to a white child, mothers marked by the cruel inequities of a racist culture. I took advantage of them even while I adored them and would fight to defend them if neighbor children called them “nigger.” My mother had severely punished me the day I came in from playing with friends on the block and asked if our yard man was a “shiftless old nigger.” “Never let me hear you call any of the colored people who work here by that common, white-trash word, do you hear me?” I heard her and never did it again, since my mother had gone on to say, once her fury had abated,