A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing

by T Cooper

  Peanut butter with banana on white.

  “What are we going to do with that, Luisa?” my mother said, her tired face confused, as she pointed to the groceries I’d tried to hide from her. I bit my tongue and didn’t admit that I too wished I’d brought home the cornmeal and tomatoes and meat she knew how to make into dishes we both understood and preferred. I stood at the cutting board over the sink and made sandwiches.

  “I might need to stay at work late tonight,” I said.

  “Be home by dinner.”

  “Mamí, the strike starts today.”

  I wasn’t sure if I’d be home for breakfast the next morning or even the morning after that. I had reliable inside information on this matter. Marjorie worked with Vita Terrall at the candy counter and Marjorie told me Vita had organized plans for the strike down to the very smallest detail. Vita told Marjorie to spread the word that we girls better come prepared to stay the night if we had to. I didn’t tell my mother this exactly, but she knew if I didn’t come home, she’d just have to accept it. It wasn’t like she had much choice. I earned all our money. Thirteen-fifty a week plus tips, at least fifty hours each week. A girl of sixteen and I was in charge at home. For all of my mother’s wrinkles and giving up hope, she knew as well as I did that it was a miracle I’d gotten the lunch counter job downtown.

  The bosses had looked at my green eyes and rosy cheeks and they’d had no inkling that my family came to Illinois from Mexico to work on the railroads. My name changed from “Luisa” to “Louella” en route from my mouth to their ears. My English accent carefully perfected, how would the bosses know I’d learned to speak their language from the evening dramas that played loud on our neighbor’s radio, most likely their one-room apartment’s only luxury?

  I spoke little beyond taking customers’ orders and saying “thank you” and “yes sir”—mostly because I had few English words to use. They liked quiet girls. They liked us interchangeable and anonymous. They never inquired about my home life. So long as I worked hard, smiled, and deferred like a polite little mouse eager to please, they didn’t care anything about me. And so they never knew my mother and I only moved to Detroit because my father had been killed in Chicago. They never knew about the derailed car that collided with the defunct boxcars beside the tracks, the makeshift steel shantytown we’d lived in as we worked. They never knew about the small stack of twenties, a large fortune for us, the company had given my mother and me to make us disappear after they put my father’s remains in a simple coffin and into the ground. Nobody at Woolworth’s knew anything about me, least of which that I’d never made or eaten a peanut butter white-bread sandwich, thin banana slices or no thin banana slices, ever before in my life.

  I knew the sandwiches would congeal into disgusting lumps before dinnertime, let alone lunch, but I’d overheard Marjorie tell another shop girl she loved peanut butter with banana on white, so I packed for the strike prepared to impress. Strike was scheduled to begin at 11, but Vita made it very clear we were to work as if nothing at all was different until she told us otherwise. So for five hours I wiped tabletops and carried heavy plates and suffered pinches on the ass by regulars who most definitely didn’t tip enough to compensate for the pounds of flesh they skimmed with all their thick paws.

  A tired mother with her young son sat at my section of the counter. I handed her a menu.

  “This menu is sticky. Don’t you know how to clean?” She sneered at me.

  In fact, the menu was clean. I’d just wiped it down with a damp white towel folded into a tidy square smelling faintly of bleach. The way the woman looked at me, I knew her pointer-dog skinny nose had detected something in me she couldn’t quite understand but that she knew her husband and his Friday clubhouse buddies might chase down in a truck and string up in a tree. I hesitated speaking for fear of a trace of any accent other than Midwest peeking through. Didn’t matter, she didn’t want to hear my voice. I wiped down her menu again and handed it back with a small smile.

  “Give me ice cream,” Junior said.

  “It’s too early for that,” his mother said.

  “Give me a triple scoop. Chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry,” Junior demanded—of me, of his mother, most likely of each woman he’d come across his entire life through.

  “You heard him,” Junior’s mother said, and thrust her menu at me.

  10:37 a.m. I served the ice cream. Refilled coffees. I delivered greasy hash browns with slimy cubed ham and American cheese omelets. I prepped tables with pristinely arranged paper napkins and scratched silver settings. I filled creamers and dusted pepper shakers. 10:59. Junior’s mother impatiently waved me down as she wiped her monster’s smudged face. 11:00 a.m.

  “Strike, girls, strike!” Hark, the angel sang.

  Vita blew the silver coach’s whistle she wore on a cord around her neck and repeated the call to arms.

  “Strike, girls, strike!” she screamed. And smiled.

  The hustle and bustle and the clanking of trays and the barking out of orders to the short-order cooks stopped. Junior’s confused mother snapped her fingers at me. In vain. I followed Vita and all the other girls upstairs to the very center of the first floor. We stood against the counters with our arms crossed. The real work had just barely begun.

  We stated our demands. I forget what they were exactly at this point. Okay, maybe I do remember them, but does it really matter anymore? I’ll play the Senile Old Woman card here. Our laundry list of demands included something like: union recognition, a ten-cent-an-hour raise, an eight-hour workday, time and a half for overtime after forty-eight hours a week, free laundering of our required uniforms, blah blah blah.

  What was important was that we shut down Woolworth’s. We shut down the entire operations of the biggest and most important store in all of downtown Detroit. People don’t seem to know this anymore, but back then Woolworth’s was like Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Costco combined. For seven days we ruled that store, got the entire nation on our side, and made Woolworth’s squirm. Workers in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles and all over the entire nation watched us and threatened to do the same. Sure, there was that big sit-down going on at General Motors at the same time, but our strike was even more important—it was 1937 and we were girls. Literally. Most of us were barely in our twenties, if that. Our parents had been Victorians, for God’s sake. We were 108 girls standing with our arms crossed, refusing to obey, screaming, “Strike, strike, strike!” at the top of our lungs. We were previously unthinkable.

  12:30 p.m. We escorted out any customers still lingering. We locked the doors from the inside. We lowered all the blinds. Waving at supporters gathering on the sidewalks, we blacked-out the street-level windows with butcher paper. We covered the counters and goods with the same paper. Shop was closed.

  Marjorie wore the biggest smile I’d ever seen on her. That glow only got brighter when Vita came around and shouted out: “Lunch downstairs is on the house, girls!”

  Ice cream, hot dogs, jelly donuts, pies, pancakes, sandwiches, sodas. My peanut butter and banana sandwiches sat lonely. A giddy and full-bellied Marjorie put her arm around my shoulders and nestled her heliotrope-perfumed hair against my shoulder.

  “Isn’t this the most amazing time, Louella?”

  Indeed.

  She looped her arm with another shop girl and they marched the floors singing trench and saloon songs they’d learned from their soldier brothers after they came back from the war, changing the lyrics to fit the occasion. “Mademoiselle from Armentieres” became:

  We slave at Woolworth’s five-and-dime,

  The pay we get is sure a crime.

  Hinky dinky parlez-vous.

  Marjorie was a natural for the strike’s Cheer-Up and Entertainment Committee. I was, of course, on the Food and Store Clean-up Committee. I kept my sandwiches handy as a matter of responsibility. As Marjorie organized impromptu “entertainments” and kept spirits light, I swept and watched for rats. I would have laughed to know the roles
we played those seven days would define our relationship for decades to come. She and all her frilly friends sat around giving each other manicures and giggling over tall stacks of awful dime books with titles like How to Get Your Man and Hold Him, books destined to be pulped, books that promised to reveal earthshattering revelations such as “Secrets to Flattery.” I could barely tolerate how froufrou girls could get in pack mode. It was hell how long into the night past our 11 p.m. curfew they chitter-chattered and laughed and threw pillows across the dozens of mattresses the cooks’ union had delivered earlier that night and that we’d set up on the store’s first floor with one pillow and one small blanket to each girl. Vita had finally gotten everyone to hush it when one of the girls with a bed in an aisle screamed bloody murder.

  “A rat! A rat!”

  This was no strike metaphor. An actual rat the size of a possum made its way across the mattresses, touching base on nearly every one. Every girl was up and screaming, and then the rat was gone and still the screaming. Vita blew her whistle.

  “Upstairs, girls. We’re going to the second floor.”

  We dragged our mattresses up the stairwell, one level further from the kitchen downstairs. It must have been 1 a.m. before we were lying down again. I started to fall asleep when I remembered my bag of sandwiches. They’d been downstairs next to my mattress. The rat. I was certain that if he hadn’t already eaten them, he would. I couldn’t get up. Vita was beyond strict at that point. The only thing that made that first awkward night livable was that Marjorie had set her pillow beside mine when we’d settled down. Three girls per mattress, me right up against Marjorie as she breathed steady, quiet little darling. I stayed awake to listen to her sleep, to enjoy the warmth of her small frame snuggling up against me to take the body warmth I would have formally offered to her along with my very soul if only I’d known how.

  8:00 a.m. Curfew lifted. I sat in the main stairwell and found the Sunday paper someone snuck in for the Scrapbook Committee. The girls had already torn out the page I guess we were on, but they’d left the rest. I read the paper. Or tried to, anyhow. Each page took at least an hour with how slow my brain translated English. But unlike having to listen to spoken word and respond without preparation, with reading I could take all the time I wanted. And during the strike, time was what I had the most of.

  That morning, girls gathering on the stairs around me to knit and crochet, I found the first article about the geisha girls: Geisha Prepare for Battle. All the way over in Osaka, Japan, three hundred geisha girls were holding a sit-down strike. They wanted a union. Their strike had started the same day as ours. At 11 a.m., same hour Vita blew her whistle for our strike, they prayed to Buddha for victory. They were singing songs and shouting protests just like we were. They were sitting strike in a temple on the top of a mountain. Just like we were.

  I kept reading and half-listened as the girls around me gossiped about what a bitch Mae was. More accurately, Mae was a girl of rigid principles. Apparently, Mae, who worked downstairs with me and had a peculiar fondness for operating the shake machine, had caught a few girls trying to sneak out the basement exit the night before to meet their boyfriends for Saturday night dates. Rumor was she’d taken the chewing gum out of her mouth and stuck it in the locks on the back doors. Those doors were locked for keeps. Marjorie was kinder in her response to the girls’ needs. That second day of the strike, Marjorie and the Cheer-up Committee set up the Love Booth.

  Girls worked themselves into frenzies at the three paystation telephones.

  “Honey, come by the store. There’s a booth. We can go in it. But only for five minutes.”

  God knows what happened each three hundred seconds in that booth, the “booth” really just a curtain set up in the corner of the third floor for a small triangle of privacy. Who knows how many extra Detroit babies were born nine months later. Even the geisha girls didn’t have a Cheer-up Committee setting up love booths. At 1 p.m. the geishas did write love letters and postcards to their patrons to flirt up support for their strike, but they didn’t let their admirers come for makeout sessions. Our strike’s Cheer-up Committee was instantly popular, as if the cheery girls on that committee hadn’t been already.

  Marjorie, the most cheerful and popular of them all, set her pillow next to mine the second night of the strike. And the third. And the fourth.

  By the fifth night, rumors were starting up that a settlement was being negotiated. Of course, none of us girls were directly involved in the negotiations; the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Local 705 was taking care of that. Our job was to keep the reporters entertained when they came around. Our job was to refuse to work. My job required me to sleep next to Marjorie on the second floor of the downtown Detroit Woolworth’s. I was the happiest of the workers for that alone, but for everything else, I felt justified in what I decided to do on the sixth day of the strike.

  8:00 a.m. Most of the girls still yawning and lazily stretching their makeshift-bed-cramped limbs, I wandered to the third floor. Past woven pastel Easter baskets and stuffed Peter Rabbit dolls decorating the seasonal-amusements section nearest the stairwell, I made my way to floor four, Jewelry.

  A few weeks before the strike started, I’d seen Marjorie admiring something in the display case there. It had been Valentine’s Day—the only time of year the store brought in actual silver and gold niceties to supplement the standard cheap-costume crap. Fancy girl, Marjorie had pet the case glass as if a small kitten purred at her from the other side. The salesgirl had taken a necklace out for her to try on. They’d giggled as Marjorie stood in front of the mirror and preened. Her break ended before mine, and I watched as she sighed and gave the necklace back. I walked over to the counter.

  “I need to buy a gift,” I’d said.

  “Marjorie downstairs dresses like a star and she loved this one,” the salesgirl said.

  She reached into the case and retrieved a light-gold necklace chain with the most delicate of heart lockets.

  “Would you like me to wrap it for you?” she asked.

  “I’ll be back next payday.”

  “It might not still be here,” she said.

  Nearly three weeks passed.

  That sixth day of the strike, I prepared myself not to find the necklace. Heavy brown butcher paper covered the case same as all the other cases in the store. Nobody was keeping watch on the fourth floor. No one saw me walk behind the counter and reach in to where I hoped the necklace would still be. Not a soul saw me slide the tiny twinkling of gold into my sweater pocket as I walked back downstairs to find Marjorie at the second-floor bathroom sinks, planning the day’s first “entertainment” with another girl.

  “We could set up a salon and have a beauty day pageant, the girls would love—”

  “Marjorie …” I interrupted.

  “Oh, good morning, Louella,” she said. She blushed. That was all I needed.

  “There’s something important,” I said.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Just important.”

  I hated how truncated and redundant my English was. I smiled and gestured for her to follow me. She did.

  With all the girls still putting on their faces and smoothing their clothes in front of mirrors on the first and second floors, the third floor was empty except for Marjorie and me. Her arm looped in mine like she did with all the girls—such a friendly doll. I led Marjorie toward the northeast corner. Then she saw the Love Booth. She hesitated. She took her arm from mine. What had I been thinking? I was such an idiot. She looked up at me with the strangest expression. Confusion? Fear? But then she smiled. A shy smile. A quiet smile. A “please do it” smile.

  My hands shaking, I reached into my pocket.

  “For you,” I said, and offered the heart locket.

  Until the day I die, I swear the kiss she gave me that day was sweeter than any other. Love Booth to hell, the entire third floor of Woolworth’s couldn’t contain that kiss. Marjorie tucked the necklace under the neck of her
sweater. “Just to be safe,” she whispered. She was smart that way. We did need to be safe. 1937. During a strike. Flashing that stolen sweetheart necklace wouldn’t have been the most self-preserving of moves.

  That night, Marjorie again put her pillow beside mine. Very close to mine. The next day, 5:30 p.m., Woolworth’s and the Local 705 came to an agreement. Each of our demands was met. Plus we were paid fifty percent of our usual rate for the time we’d occupied the store. Employees at all forty Detroit Woolworth’s received the improvements. Marjorie was wearing the heart locket I’d given her. Victory was sweet and far-reaching.

  The headlines read:

  Stand-Up Win for Sit-Down Girls;

  Rich Success for Five and Dime Valentines

  Two days later:

  Geisha Union Recognized—

  Osaka Teahouse Girls Back to Work

  And then, February 5, 1960, nearly twenty-three years after our sit-down strike:

  Klan Objects to Negro Lunch Counter Protest

  Two days after that, reported from Greensboro, North Carolina:

  Negro Protest Closes Woolworth’s

  Indeed, victory was sweet and far-reaching.

  Patti was done with me. The operator promised the heart locket would be delivered to my home address with a gift card enclosed. I hung up the phone just as Marjorie walked into our hotel room waving two crisp hundreds in her hand.