In many cases, the housewives were neither accustomed to hired help nor familiar with colored people, harboring assumptions and prejudices of the day due to lack of exposure.142 The housewives and their domestics brought differing expectations, and frequently each side felt somehow aggrieved. While an employer could go out and hire someone else, some employees, having no legal recourse, took their frustrations out on their madames’ homes when not paid or otherwise exploited, slashing the draperies they had just ironed or defacing the floors they had scrubbed.
Aside from these sources of friction, colored domestics could not know what perils they might face from opportunistic sons or husbands assuming that younger domestics would do more than just clean. As it was, the very act of walking the streets for work came awfully close in appearance to how prostitutes plied their trade—except that the domestics were working at the whim of Janes instead of Johns.
The expectation that any colored woman walking in the white section of town was available to scrub floors and wash windows would continue into the 1960s, such that a colored professional woman appearing in a white neighborhood in the North had to be prepared to be called out to just because she was black. “Say, girl,” a woman called out to my mother in the late 1950s when she was on her way, in her tailored suit and heels, to decorate and fit slip covers in Cleveland Park, a wealthy neighborhood in Washington, D.C. “Could you come up here and clean my bathroom?”
“I’m looking for someone to clean mine,” my mother yelled back to the woman.
Ida Mae’s husband would not have stood for his wife to walk the streets for work, and in any case, Chicago had grown so segregated that the wealthy white neighborhoods were far from where they lived. But one day Ida Mae got word of a job from someone she knew from back home in Mississippi, and that felt a little safer.
A girl who was doing day’s work for a well-to-do couple on the North Side needed someone to fill in for her. It would be temporary, Ida Mae’s friend told her, but would have to do for now.
“Miss Gladney will work in your place,” Ida Mae’s friend told the girl.
The job was more than an hour away on the streetcar, farther north of the Loop than she lived south, almost up near Evanston. The regular girl who mopped floors and folded laundry for the family would be away for a week. The job was paying something like four or five dollars a day. Ida Mae didn’t hesitate.
“I was glad to take her place,” she would say years later.
She dressed for the job and took a change of clothes with her. It turned out to be a man and his wife living in a grand apartment above a shoe store the wife ran.
Ida Mae took the elevator up and went into a glorious apartment, where she found the husband alone in the couple’s bedroom. He was still asleep, which seemed odd to Ida Mae, so she began looking for things to do. The husband roused himself and told Ida Mae what he expected of her.
“Get in the bed with me,” he said.
He told her the regular girl stayed in bed with him all day long. He reassured Ida Mae not to worry, he’d do the cleaning later. He figured that was a fair exchange and good deal for her, a cleaning girl not having to clean at all and still getting paid for it.
Ida Mae was in her midtwenties, a mother of three by then, married to a pious man who wouldn’t stand for another man touching his wife. She knew white men in the South took whatever liberties they wanted with colored women, and there was nothing the women or their husbands could do about it. All her life in Mississippi, she had managed to avoid unwanted advances because she had rarely worked in white people’s homes. Now here she was in Chicago, a white man expecting her to sleep with him as if that were what any colored woman would just naturally want to do. And no matter what happened, she would have no legal recourse. There would be no witnesses. It just would be a privileged man’s word against hers.
She was thinking fast. She was as mad at the girl who sent her without warning her of what the job really entailed as she was at the man expecting her to climb into bed with him with his wife just a floor below. She started to leave. But she had come all this way, had spent the train fare, and she needed the money.
Her body stiffened, and she backed away from the man.
“Just show me what you want cleaned,” Ida Mae said.
Somehow, something in the way she stood or looked straight at him as she said it let the man know she meant business. He didn’t press the matter. He left her alone.
“He didn’t say no more ’cause he seen I wasn’t that type of person,” Ida Mae said years later.
And perhaps in that moment Ida Mae discovered one difference between the North and South. She would not likely have gotten out of it in Mississippi. Her refusal would have been seen as impudence, all but assuring an assault. And there would have been nothing done about it. Here, the northern man seemed to view such a conquest as a hoped-for fringe benefit rather than a right. That, along with Ida Mae’s indignation over the whole thing, appeared to keep her safe.
That day, she cleaned the bathroom, the kitchen, the bedroom, and changed the linens as she had gone there to do. The man stayed in his room. She never went back.
She missed out on the rest of the week’s pay, which she desperately needed. Later, she confronted the regular girl who worked for the couple.
“So you don’t do nothin’ but stay in the bed all day, huh?” Ida Mae said. “Don’t ask me to go back up there again.”
The girl paid Ida Mae out of the money she was making off the couple. The whole sordid affair stayed with Ida Mae for years. She couldn’t see how the girl could live with herself.
“I just don’t know,” Ida Mae would say years later. “Supposing the wife came back home? I just couldn’t see how she did it.”
With five mouths to feed, the family couldn’t go much longer unless Ida Mae found a job. In the fall of 1939, something finally opened up at Inland Steel, over at Sixty-third and Melvina, on the city’s southwest side. George had a brother working there. At this point, Ida Mae didn’t much care what it was as long as it wasn’t day’s work cleaning toilets and fighting off the madame’s husband.
It was her first real job in Chicago. They called her a press operator. She was in the canning department, where her job was to work the presser that attached the curved tops that cover cans as they came down the assembly line. She had to fit the tops on, her arms going up and down and up and down, over and over and over again.
She was excited at first but then found it to be a nerve-jangling endeavor. The factory was loud, the noise a little like being inside a car engine. The mechanical arms that she operated were sharp and heavy and were known to slice off people’s fingers and hands.
She was on the line one day when another worker, a colored woman, got some of her fingers cut off. Ida Mae was a couple of machines down from her.
There wasn’t much of a commotion, as Ida Mae remembered it.
“They stopped everybody for a while,” she said. “Then they went out with her so fast. And she never did come back.”
Ida Mae quit soon after that. A line job turned up at Campbell Soup, where George was working. It wouldn’t last long either, after a woman stole her coat that winter. She got a job at a printing press, and it looked to be a good one. But in time she would get a job at a hospital, Walther Memorial on the West Side of Chicago, working as a hospital aide. She sterilized instruments, cheered up patients, which was her specialty, and organized the gauzes, bandages, and intravenous lines in central supply.
It took her a while to learn how everything worked and how to get the little scissors and scalpels cleaned just so.
“I wash tray by tray and put the instruments back in there till I learned it,” Ida Mae said. “And I learned all them instruments. Some of them I couldn’t call the name, but you better believe I know where they went.”
Sometimes she would poke her head in during surgery when she dropped off a tray of instruments she had sterilized. She liked to see the babies come into the
world, and the doctors let her stay sometimes.
She had been through it four times herself and still marveled at the sight and sound of a new life making its entrance. “They always come out hollering,” she said. Just like her babies had.
“You know, that’s amazing, ain’t it?” she said.
With Ida Mae working, the family could move out of the one-room apartment at Twenty-first and State and into a flat big enough for everyone. In the coming years, they would live all over the black belt.
Now that they were getting situated, people from back home in Mississippi started to make their way north to stay or to visit and see what it was like.
Saint, who had helped them move their things from Edd Pearson’s plantation and get out of Mississippi, came up with his wife, Catherine, and their children, and stayed for good. Ida Mae’s brother-in-law Aubrey, her younger sister Talma’s husband, came up for a while to see if he would like it, but he didn’t and moved back to Mississippi, where the people tipped their hat to you as they passed and looked up to him because of his family’s long years in the South, where he had made peace and found a way to get along with the white people and benefit from it. Joe Lee, whose flogging was the reason George and Ida Mae had left, even came up and lived there for a while. But he was never quite right after all he had been through. He never married and did not make out very well or live too long, and nobody cared to talk about him very much.
One time, George’s brother Winston, whom everyone called Win, came up from the plantation just for a visit and wasn’t ashamed to look up at the tall buildings reaching for the sky.
George took him around the first day, and at the end of it they settled in for the night. Win got ready for bed and then started calling for his brother.
“Come help me,” Win said. “I can’t blow this light out.”
George found him standing by the bulb. Win had been blowing on the bulb until he was almost out of breath.
“Win, you can’t blow it out, you got to turn it off,” George told him, reaching for the light switch and shaking his head. It hadn’t been that long ago that he, too, had been callow to the New World.
“George showed him how to cut it off,” Ida Mae said, “and we never had no more trouble with him.”
They were becoming Chicagoans now. They would talk about Win and that lightbulb for years.
It was only a matter of time before just about every colored family in the North, unsettled though they might have been, got visitors as George and Ida Mae did. There was a back-and-forth of people, anxious, giddy, wanting to come north and see what all the fuss was about. And whenever a colored guest paid a visit while the Migration was on, and even decades later, he or she could be assured of finding the same southern peasant food, the same turnip greens, ham hocks, corn bread in Chicago as in Mississippi.
But the visitors were a curiosity to the children of the North. The uncles and cousins from the South often had a slow-talking, sweetly alien, wide-openness about them that could both enchant and startle some of the more reserved nieces and nephews who barely knew them, as was the case with a character from Mississippi visiting relatives in Pittsburgh in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson in the following exchange:
BOY WILLIE: How you doing, sugar?143
MARETHA: Fine.
BOY WILLIE: You was just a little old thing last time I seen you. You remember me, don’t you? This your Uncle Boy Willie from down South. That there’s Lymon. He my friend. We come up here to sell watermelons. You like watermelons?
(MARETHA nods.)
We got a whole truckload out front. You can have as many as you want. What you been doing?
MARETHA: Nothing.
BOY WILLIE: Don’t be shy now. Look at you getting all big. How old is you?
MARETHA: Eleven. I’m gonna be twelve soon.
BOY WILLIE: You like it up here? You like the North?
MARETHA: It’s alright.
BOY WILLIE: That there’s Lymon. Did you say hi to Lymon?
MARETHA: Hi.
LYMON: How you doing? You look just like your mama. I remember you when you was wearing diapers.
BOY WILLIE: You gonna come down South and see me? Uncle boy Willie gonna get him a farm. Gonna get a great big old farm. Come down there and I’ll teach you how to ride a mule. Teach you how to kill a chicken, too.
NEW YORK, 1950S
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING
GEORGE WAS JUST BACK ONE EVENING from a forty-eight-hour turnaround from New York to Florida and to New York again and had gotten his check and cashed it. Rather than head straight home to Inez, he thought he’d stop and get a drink at a bar near Penn Station.
He was with another colored railroad attendant, chugging his beer as the bar filled up. He and his co-worker barely noticed that everyone else at the bar happened to be white as they regaled each other with stories from riding the rails. When it was time to go, they paid their tab and put their glasses down.
The bartender had said very little to them the whole time they were there.144 Now the bartender calmly picked up their glasses, and instead of loading them into a tray to be washed, he took them and smashed them under the counter. The sound of glass breaking on concrete startled George and his co-worker, even though this wasn’t the first time this had happened to them, just not at this bar, and it attracted the attention of other patrons.
“They do it right in front of us,” George said. “That’s the way they let us know they didn’t want us in there. As fast as you drink out of a glass and set it down, they break it.”
There were no colored or white signs in New York. That was the unnerving and tricky part of making your way through a place that looked free. You never knew when perfect strangers would remind you that, as far as they were concerned, you weren’t equal and might never be. It was just the prerogative of whoever happened to be in a position to keep you from getting what the law said you had a right to, because nobody was going to enforce it anyway.
And so the glass he drank from went crashing under a counter in Manhattan.
It was hitting George in all directions. At sudden and unexpected times like these in New York, in crude and predictable ways when he went back south for his job, and now on the train itself. He was a stickler for rules and regulations and businesslike comportment even if it was only for lifting and loading bags. He was in uniform and was representing not just the railroad but himself and colored people, and he took the job of attending to his passengers seriously.
His formal bearing did not sit well with some of the southern conductors he worked for, who considered him acting above his station, which to his mind he was. He still saw himself as the college boy, someone who read the newspapers, kept up with world affairs, and knew as much as most anyone he was serving. The white southerners he worked with didn’t like it any more than the grove foremen did.
“They kept me at a hardship,” George said.
Somehow, without trying, he managed to get on the bad side of a southern conductor out of Tampa.
The conductor liked to tease and joke with the colored attendants, one in particular. The conductor would nudge and kick the colored attendant, and the colored attendant, knowing his place, would jump and laugh and, to George’s mind, put on a show for the conductor.
“Hah, hah, don’t do that, Cap!” the colored attendant would josh the conductor in mock protest.
George stood stone-faced and made no attempt to hide his disdain.
Now the conductor began making extra demands on them all. He liked to make the rail attendants wipe the railcar steps while the train was moving. He got a kick out of that.
He wanted the attendants to drop the traps of the bottom step and wipe the steps down so he wouldn’t get dirt on him when he got off to direct passengers at the station. Usually, it was something the attendants did once the train had stopped. The conductor didn’t want that. He liked to see them bending over, dangling along the side, and struggling to wipe the bottom step while the tra
in was running twenty-five, thirty miles an hour.
George resisted wiping the steps until he thought it was safe. The other car attendant did as the conductor ordered. George stood to the side, his face pinched and frowning, as his co-worker tried to hold on and clean the step with the train rocking toward the station and the conductor chortling at the sight of it.
One day the conductor confronted George.
“What’s the matter with you, boy? You can’t laugh?”
“Yes, sir, I have a good sense of humor,” George said. “But I don’t see anything funny about what y’all are doing.”
The conductor began singling out George from that day on, blocking him in the aisles, jabbing him as he passed. There was little George could do about it and still keep his job. George had been through worse things in the South and figured it was just one more thing he would have to watch out for.
But it got to the point that, when George saw him coming down the aisle to check tickets, he had to step between the seats to avoid a confrontation.
“He got to the place when he get along about where I was,” George said, “and he would step out of the aisle in between the seats and step on my foot, like that. And then he’ll walk back and look at me.”
George thought to himself, “I don’t know how I’m a deal with this ’cause he gonna do this one day and I’m a try to kill him.”
“I was praying that I never had to reach that point,” he said.
One afternoon, they were pulling out of Clearwater on the Silver Star, a sleek, steel-encased all-reserve train that was the pride of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad. It went up the west coast of Florida along the Gulf of Mexico en route to New York. It had only the finest and highest-class people on it, as George remembered, and he had worked his way up to that route.
The Warmth of Other Suns Page 40
