There was no fifteen- and sixteen-year-old world. Making it alone. Food to buy. Worn clothes to replace. Room rent to pay. But night remained day, and day night, in the work her mother’s friends helped her to find. You’re too good for this mess on the South Side, Sadie. So she started out cleaning the gold spittoons in one of the fanciest whorehouses downtown on South Dearborn. They told her she was lucky to get it. The two sisters who ran it were from an old Kentucky family and they would never have hired a colored maid who they thought might have been out on the streets. And looking around at the deep Persian rugs, velvet draperies, and gilded mirrors, Sadie thought she was lucky too. Meticulous as she was about her dress and her work, she moved up quickly there. Within a year she was part of the live-in staff and they let her darn the tatted lace on the cambric sheets and hand wash the negligees. Then she got to carry up the brandy and whiskey to a girl’s room when a customer ordered them because nothing she saw behind those closed doors seemed to unnerve her. She could maneuver the heavy silver trays without rattling the glasses, keeping her eyes veiled and her hands steady as she served them, even the night she was called up to pour for an alderman and his German shepherd.
She finally became the personal maid for one of the house favorites. It brought bigger pay but longer hours. A tall, green-eyed blonde who insisted on Sadie changing her entire hairdo between each customer. And since this one was especially good with getting a hard-on out of the drunks, there were more trays to carry up during the night, more torn and whiskey-stained gowns to right before she could get to bed herself in the mornings. It’s a shame you’re a nigger, Sadie, the blonde confided one slow evening, or you could make out really well here. But Sadie wasn’t dreaming of being taken on as one of the house whores; she was standing by the back gate on Saturday mornings, waiting for the wood wagon to come.
He was the color of his horse, a sort of matted chestnut. And when he lifted up the heavy cords of firewood, the muscles bulged and danced under his shirt. A strong man, although his hair was streaked with gray. For a while they never spoke beyond a good-morning. He didn’t seem curious about why she was always out there. When you’re doing business with a place like that, it’s best to ask no questions. Besides, any help who wanted to keep their job inside knew to answer none. Sadie pretended not to watch him as he piled the firewood in the shed, rang the back bell for his payment, and went on his way. She’d have her head turned as if something at the far end of the street had her attention. It was turned just that way one morning he was leaving when she said, My name is Sadie. His only answer to the back of her neck was, Well, have a good day, Sadie. As his wagon pulled out from the gate, he glanced back quickly at the face behind the wrought-iron bars. That gal has strange eyes, he thought. But every Saturday after that it was, Good morning, Sadie. And she lived through each week of nights for the sound of her name in his mouth.
She’d sweep the blonde’s curls into a pile on her head and pin them in place seeing a trim white bungalow with a green picket fence, starched curtains at the window where she waited for his wagon to pull up after his day was over. She’d powder over freckles on the bare cleavage and shoulders as she picked withered buds from a yard full of roses. She was baking bread for him and roasting chickens as she mopped up spilled perfume and capped jars of rouge. The mingled smells of stale cigars, day-old sweat, and heated groins were the freshness of sunshine and wind on her backyard line as she changed the sheets in the mirrored room. If I didn’t work in here, she thought, he would believe I was good enough to tell me his name. After all, it had been three years. And she lived in dread that he would stop bringing their wood before she learned it.
But in fact he was there for the regular delivery on the very day the federal marshals were closing the house down. A righteous wind had up and started blowing through the country. And with the First World War in full gear, the fancy whorehouses were falling like dominoes all over the big cities.
—Damn fools, the blonde told Sadie, there’s no way for them to nail a Vacate sign on every woman’s pussy.
But when the sign was nailed beneath the brass knocker on the front door, the kitchen and parlor help were already packing their bags. The Kentucky sisters tried to tell them there was still two weeks’ worth of work left in just the clearing out. But colored people had learned that with the law at the front door, it was best to leave as quick as they could through the back. Hang around too long and the blame might be put on them for the whole idea of the place.
When his wagon pulled up that Saturday morning, Sadie was out there as usual, only this time she had her paisley satchel with her. She found the courage to look him full in the face for the first time in three years: I didn’t want to leave without knowing your name. And then she dropped her head, which relieved him because he’d never liked her eyes. He took in the rest of her, though: the neatly braided hair, the slender neck, full bust, narrow waist, those tiny fine-boned hands that she clutched in front of her. You got any people? he asked. She shook her head no. He didn’t say anything else to her until he had unloaded the wood and rung the bell for his last payment. I could use me a wife, he finally said. I can’t have children, she answered. He motioned for her to climb up beside him in the wagon. Well, at my age, I probably couldn’t give ’em to you. She sat down beside him, her satchel on her lap. And your name? Sadie asked. Daniel, he said as they pulled off in the wagon together. The whole conversation took all of five minutes, but it was about the longest one they would have during their entire marriage. She went off with a man older than enough to be her father, and she ended up living with her mother again for the next twenty-five years.
Daniel’s drinking was quiet, though. Everything about the man was quiet, so Sadie suited him just fine. She knew how not to be there. And his house was kept so clean it was eerie. Not a trim little bungalow with a green picket fence, a three-room shanty hemmed in by other three-room shanties near the railroad tracks. The yard couldn’t even grow weeds. Whatever soil there might have been was lost under layers of coal soot mixed with the gravel and rocks sliding down the grading from the tracks. And a little bit more would slide each day as the 7:20, 11:55, 3:12 eastbounds and the 5:15, 8:40 westbounds thundered past. The floor planks would start vibrating and the dishes rattling on the shelves to announce the trains approaching before the piercing whistles and clouds of black smoke invaded every corner of the house. The smoke clouds left behind a dark rain of cinder and coal dust to be breathed into their lungs. The rest was left to settle wherever it could: the tin roofs, windowsills, doorsteps, lines of laundry.
Sadie couldn’t do anything about cleaning the roof, but with the places she could reach she ran a race against the 5:15, 7:20, 11:55, and 3:12. As steady as a clock: Daniel gets his breakfast, his lunch pail is packed, and he’s out of the door. The 5:15. Sweep down the front porch and railings. Set the fire going for the laundry kettle, making sure the lid is on tight. The 7:20. Boil and stir the sheets, pillowcases, shirts, pants, and leggings. Wash down the outside windows. Do the breakfast dishes. Wring out the sheets, pillowcases, shirts, pants, and leggings. Empty the iron kettle. Throw the wrung clothes back in, making sure the lid is on tight. The 11:55. Wipe down the rope clothesline. Hang up the washed clothes, praying there won’t be too strong a wind. Finish the kitchen. Do the beds. Mop the floors. Bring in the damp clothes from the line. The 3:12. Wipe down the rope clothesline again. Rehang the few pieces still too wet. Start heating the flatiron to press the others. Press a piece. Chop the collard greens. Press a piece. Set the dough to rise. Press a piece. Bring in the rest of the clothes. Fold and put away the laundry. Pluck the chicken. Finish up the dinner. Go spread lime in the outhouse. A quick sweep of the front steps again. A quick wipe of the outside windows. Daniel comes home. The days it wasn’t laundry between the 5:15, 7:20, 11:55, and 3:12, it was sewing. And the days it wasn’t sewing, it was firing and scraping the cast-iron pots. And the days it wasn’t that, it was working on her garden. But each day all activ
ity stopped when Daniel came home.
He thought Sadie cleaned too much; the neighbors were beginning to think her peculiar. Talk had it that this new wife of his was putting on airs. All of them could live with the grimy windows that got done maybe once each spring. With kitchen curtains grown dingy and gray from the black clouds of soot. With the gravel banked up against the rusted tin cans and scrap metal in their yards. It’s not that they didn’t clear it all out every now and then. It’s not that they were a bunch of pigs who didn’t care. If they could live with all of it, what was she trying to prove? Sadie worshiped the man who had given her the closest thing that she would ever have to what she’d dreamed of. And she was trying to prove that she deserved it.
So she would grit her teeth as the 8:40 P.M. screamed past and not jump up to take in her geraniums before coal dust settled among the blooms. But those times after Daniel had drunk himself to sleep, she would slip out with a kerosene lamp to gently wipe down the velvety leaves. She needed to be inside anyway when he was drinking because it was the only way she could find out what was really on his mind. He spent six days a week hauling odds and ends. Furniture. Scrap metal. Rags. Firewood. A white man’s mule, he’d tell Sadie. He hated the work he did, and he hated even more talking about it. They ate their dinner totally in silence, unless it was one of those rare times he had a question to ask her or she had a repair for him to do. She’d know when it had been an especially rough day for him after she’d cleared the dishes. He’d work his toothpick around in his mouth and announce to the air, I think I’ll have a taste. Then she knew to take the new bottle of whiskey from the cupboard and set it in front of him with a clean glass. It was always a new bottle. He never stopped until it was through.
Sadie would fade into the corner chair as he drank while staring into the air. At first she’d tried reading; she liked picture books because her schooling didn’t amount to a hill of beans and she could fill in the missing story herself. But the house was so quiet he could still hear the pages turn. Noise, was all he had to say. She’d close the book in her lap. But she found that sewing worked, and it was a way to get the leftover darning done. She’d time biting the thread to the click of the bottle’s neck on his glass. The silence in the room was always shattered with the passing of the 8:40, and if he’d been at it long enough, she found out all she needed to know. As the vibrating house settled, it might be one sentence, sometimes two, rarely more than three. And he always spoke them to the air: My name ain’t nigger. So he hadn’t moved his wagon fast enough for a policeman that day. Pissing in my pants. Blood running down San Juan Hill. Flames. So he’d been decorated in the Spanish-American War. The Ninth Cavalry charging with Teddy Roosevelt. And later his buddy got pulled off a troop train in North Carolina and lynched. One sentence, sometimes two. She sewed them together over twenty-five years to form the story of a bitter man who could once ride a horse like a god and had to become a mule to keep his family from starvation. There was the first wife, who died. The second wife, who ran off with his cousin. And the two daughters, who never wrote.
His drinking also let Sadie know what he thought of her. And she found out it wasn’t very much. He mistrusted her eyes. There was something, something, just hanging on the edge of them he couldn’t put his finger on. Her cleaning irritated him—her way of saying that where he’d brought her to live wasn’t good enough. The prim way of eating. The prim way of wiping her mouth. All of it saying that nothing around her was good enough. And he suspected that she couldn’t have children because she’d caught some white man’s disease in that white whorehouse. And if he ever found out that was the case, that she was carrying some white man’s disease into his bed, he would beat her senseless. As Sadie pieced together all of this information, she didn’t confront him with it either to deny or explain. He never remembered the next morning what he’d said anyway. And he certainly couldn’t remember over years of such mornings.
The hurt she felt over learning of his feelings was a small hurt compared to some others she’d known. She could bear that as long as he let her stay there. And she made his life much too comfortable for him not to. They both discovered that the week she was sick, the week that led up to their one and only fight. The lesions the scalpel had left in that back room smelling of dogs and cats would flare up now and then. The older she grew, the worse the pains became. She stayed in bed all day and night this time, turning her head away from the grime building up on the bedroom windows. Daniel still had to work while fixing his meals and hers. He had to empty her chamber pot and even started using it himself because he couldn’t stand the way the outhouse started smelling. He was tracking cinders in from the front porch and they left a gritty feeling on the floor that set his teeth on edge. Flies were attracted to the dirty dishes piling up in the basin and they lit on his food and buzzed around his head. Now when he woke up after drinking, he’d find the overturned bottle and glass on the sticky table. He started thinking maybe he should stop. He started thinking the place was disgusting. He’d bathe Sadie’s head with cool towels, asking her if today was the day she felt well enough to get up. Finally one day she did. And she found her geraniums dying.
She grew the red geraniums on the back porch in any sort of container she could salvage: Mason jars, dented tin buckets, fruit crates, a few real clay pots that she scraped from the house money to buy. They were the reddest flowers she could find, hardy enough to thrive through the soot and vibrations. She used garbage peelings and horse manure to enrich the soil she took from public lots on the other side of town. And she nourished the new blooms with water that she’d soaked eggshells in. The flowers that couldn’t fit on the porch sat on the railings, hung from the eaves on ropes, and lined the back steps. Each spring, when they came to full color, Sadie had the garden she needed to round out her dream. But they were all brown-spotted and parched the day she got out of bed.
Her voice shocked Daniel: I asked you to water these. She turned those strange eyes on him and he almost started to explain before he caught himself. This woman needed to know her place.
—I ain’t your hired help. And I been meaning to get rid of them anyway.
And to make good his threat, he bent down to pick up a pot. Later he would say that she shoved him, but it was the surprise that she would even put her hand on his shoulder to stay him that tumbled him over. He hit the porch floor smack on his behind and stared up at her, his mouth dropped into a large O.
—They leave, I leave, she said.
He jumped up, took a pot, and smashed it in the yard.
—Woman, this is my damn house.
—They leave, I leave, she said.
She went inside, the screen door banging shut behind her. The sound made him flinch. I oughta come in there to beat you senseless, he yelled while he stood there totally confused. Then he picked up one of the Mason jars and threw it against the house to be sure she would hear it. He tiptoed over to the window to peek in and see if she was packing. He saw through the grimy windowpane that she was. He made a bad show of hurrying into the house without seeming to hurry. He took the beaten-up satchel away from Sadie.
—They stay, he said.
Without a word she left the bedroom and began to clean up a week’s worth of dishes. That done, she went outside to water her geraniums.
After that one fight, she knew there was nothing to fear if she used a few extra cents to buy real kitchen curtains instead of the old sheets she was used to hemming up. A rag rug went down on the floor. A chintz cover was put on the easy chair. She’d hand him the bills and serve up his dinner. He’d get drunk on those nights and talk about fancy-minded South Side trash. Still, buckets of white paint and a borrowed ladder were waiting outside for him each spring. He flat-out refused to build a picket fence to enclose nothing but gravel, but he did take the lumber and fashion her some huge flower boxes, so geraniums were now blooming in each corner of the yard. She went out there herself and painted the boxes green.
The laws of natur
e finally made her a widow; the man was thirty years her senior. But it was human nature that threatened to take away her home. The two daughters who never wrote managed to show up after the funeral with the deed to that shack. They’d have been hard pressed to find anyone else who wanted it, and they could’ve rented it to Sadie like she begged them. Just rent it to her, for any price they set, until she could work for the money to buy it outright. No, they didn’t want to rent; they wanted to sell. They saw no reasons to make allowances for that old drunk’s young wife. No shame, up and marrying women even younger than them after he’d driven their mother to her grave. And no telling what kind of money she’d already weaseled out of the senile fool. Buy or get out.
Man’s law stepped in and said no matter what, they had to give her thirty days. And nowhere was God’s law working in all of this, or lightning would have been dancing around those railroad tracks as Sadie sold everything the two daughters couldn’t claim: his broken-down nag and the wagon, all of his clothes, any of her spare clothes, the pots and pans, the furniture. She stripped the place bare trying to keep it. It took her ten days to get rid of what had been accumulated in twenty-five years, and it brought the sum total of $97.50. But they were asking $200.00 for the house. And only twenty days left to make the rest of the money. Sadie’s head was spinning as she searched through the place looking for anything else she could get rid of. She might sell the bed and sleep on the floor, but with all of the quilts already gone she couldn’t even make herself a pallet. And that one chair and battered kitchen table wouldn’t bring in more than a dollar, even if she was lucky. In the back of a cabinet she found the cracked sugar bowl she’d used as a bank over the years. She dumped out the handful of pennies, and no matter how many times she counted them, they still only added up to 25. Well, she’d go find herself some work. That was all there was to it. She’d work herself to the bone until she got what was needed to make the deadline for that house. But she looked up, frantic, to discover that the sun was almost setting on the first of the twenty days.
Bailey's Cafe Page 5
