Lot a work to be done.”
She starts fiddling with her wedding ring. “I guess Missus Walters’ was a lot easier than this would be. I mean, it’s just us now, but when we
get to having kids…”
“You, uh, got some other maids you considering?”
She sighs. “A bunch have come out here. I just haven’t found…the right one yet.” She bites on her fingernails, shifts her eyes away.
I wait for her to say I’m not the right one either, but we just stand there breathing in that flour. Final y, I play my last card, whisper it because
it’s al I got left.
“You know, I only left Miss Walters cause she going up to the rest home. She didn’t fire me.”
But she just stares down at her bare feet, black-soled because her floors haven’t been scrubbed since she moved in this big old dirty house.
And it’s clear, this lady doesn’t want me.
“Wel ,” she says, “I appreciate you driving al this way. Can I at least give you some money for the gas?”
I pick up my pocketbook and thrust it up under my armpit. She gives me a cheery smile I could wipe off with one swat. Damn that Hil y
Holbrook.
“No ma’am, no, you cannot.”
“I knew it was gonna be a chore finding someone, but…”
I stand there listening to her acting al sorry but I just think, Get it over with, lady, so I can tell Leroy we got to move all the way to the North Pole next to Santy Claus where nobody’s heard Hilly’s lies about me.
“…and if I were you I wouldn’t want to clean this big house either.”
I look at her square on. Now that’s just excusing herself a little too much, pretending Minny ain’t getting the job cause Minny don’t want the
job.
“When you hear me say I don’t want a clean this house?”
“It’s alright, five maids have already told me it’s too much work.”
I look down at my hundred-and-sixty-five-pound, five-foot-zero self practical y busting out of my uniform. “Too much for me?”
She blinks at me a second. “You…you’l do it?”
“Why you think I drove al the way out here to kingdom come, just to burn gas?” I clamp my mouth shut. Don’t go ruirning this now, she
offering you a jay-o-bee. “Miss Celia, I be happy to work for you.”
She laughs and the crazy woman goes to hug me, but I step back a little, let her know that’s not the kind of thing I do.
“Hang on now, we got to talk about some things first. You got to tel me what days you want me here and…and that kind a thing.” Like how
much you paying.
“I guess…whenever you feel like coming,” she says.
“For Miss Walters I work Sunday through Friday.”
Miss Celia chews some more on her pink pinky-nail. “You can’t come here on weekends.”
“Alright.” I need the days, but maybe later on she’l let me do some party serving or whatnot. “Monday through Friday then. Now, what time
you want me here in the morning?”
“What time do you want to come in?”
I’ve never had this choice before. I feel my eyes narrow up. “How bout eight. That’s when Miss Walters used to get me in.”
“Alright, eight’s real good.” Then she stands there like she’s waiting for my next checker move.
“Now you supposed to tel me what time I got to leave.”
“What time?” asks Celia.
I rol my eyes at her. “Miss Celia, you supposed to tel me that. That’s the way it works.”
She swal ows, like she’s trying real hard to get this down. I just want to get through this before she changes her mind about me.
“How bout four o’clock?” I say. “I work eight to four and I gets some time for lunch or what-have-you.”
“That’s just fine.”
“Now…we got to talk bout pay,” I say and my toes start wriggling in my shoes. It must not be much if five maids already said no.
Neither one of us says anything.
“Now come on, Miss Celia. What your husband say you can pay?”
She looks off at the Veg-O-Matic I bet she can’t even use and says, “Johnny doesn’t know.”
“Alright then. Ask him tonight what he wants to pay.”
“No, Johnny doesn’t know I’m bringing in help.”
My chin drops down to my chest. “What you mean he don’t know?”
“I am not tel ing Johnny.” Her blue eyes are big, like she’s scared to death of him.
“And what’s Mister Johnny gone do if he come home and find a colored woman up in his kitchen?”
“I’m sorry, I just can’t—”
“I’l tel you what he’s gone do, he’s gone get that pistol and shoot Minny dead right here on this no-wax floor.”
Miss Celia shakes her head. “I’m not tel ing him.”
“Then I got to go,” I say. Shit. I knew it. I knew she was crazy when I walked in the door—
“It’s not that I’d be fibbing to him. I just need a maid—”
“A course you need a maid. Last one done got shot in the head.”
“He never comes home during the day. Just do the heavy cleaning and teach me how to fix supper and it’l only take a few months—”
My nose prickles from something burning. I see a waft of smoke coming from the oven. “And then what, you gone fire me after them few
months?”
“Then I’l …tel him,” she say but she’s frowning at the thought. “Please, I want him to think I can do it on my own. I want him to think I’m…worth
the trouble.”
“Miss Celia…” I shake my head, not believing I’m already arguing with this lady and I haven’t worked here two minutes. “I think you done
burned up your cake.”
She grabs a rag and rushes to the oven and jerks the cake out. “Oww! Dawgon it!”
I set my pocketbook down, sidle her out of the way. “You can’t use no wet towel on a hot pan.”
I grab a dry rag and take that black cake out the door, set it down on the concrete step.
Miss Celia stares down at her burned hand. “Missus Walters said you were a real good cook.”
“That old woman eat two butterbeans and say she ful . I couldn’t get her to eat nothing.”
“How much was she paying you?”
“Dol ar an hour,” I say, feeling kind of ashamed. Five years and not even minimum wage.
“Then I’l pay you two.”
And I feel al the breath slip out of me.
“When Mister Johnny get out the house in the morning?” I ask, cleaning up the butterstick melting right on the counter, not even a plate under
it.
“Six. He can’t stand to do-dad around here very long. Then he heads back from his real estate office about five.”
I do some figuring and even with the fewer hours it’d be more pay. But I can’t get paid if I get shot dead. “I’l leave at three then. Give myself
two hours coming and going so I can stay out a his way.”
“Good.” She nods. “It’s best to be safe.”
On the back step, Miss Celia dumps the cake in a paper sack. “I’l have to bury this in the waste bin so he won’t know I’ve burned up another
one.”
I take the bag out of her hands. “Mister Johnny ain’t seeing nothing. I’l throw it out at my house.”
“Oh, thank you.” Miss Celia shakes her head like that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for her. She holds her hands in tight little fists
under her chin. I walk out to my car.
I sit in the sagging seat of the Ford Leroy’s stil paying his boss twelve dol ars every week for. Relief hits me. I have final y gotten myself a
job. I don’t have to move to the North Pole. Won’t Santy Claus be disappointed.
“SIT DOWN ON YOUR BEHIND, Minny, because I’m about to tel you the rules for working in a White Lady’s house.”
I was fourteen years old to the day. I sat at the little wooden table in my mama’s kitchen eyeing that caramel cake on the cooling rack,
waiting to be iced. Birthdays were the only day of the year I was al owed to eat as much as I wanted.
I was about to quit school and start my first real job. Mama wanted me to stay on and go to ninth grade—she’d always wanted to be a
schoolteacher instead of working in Miss Woodra’s house. But with my sister’s heart problem and my no-good drunk daddy, it was up to me and
Mama. I already knew about housework. After school, I did most of the cooking and the cleaning. But if I was going off to work in somebody else’s
house, who’d be looking after ours?
Mama turned me by the shoulders so I’d look at her instead of the cake. Mama was a crack-whip. She was proper. She took nothing from
nobody. She shook her finger so close to my face, it made me cross-eyed.
“Rule Number One for working for a white lady, Minny: it is nobody’s business. You keep your nose out of your White Lady’s problems, you
don’t go crying to her with yours—you can’t pay the light bil ? Your feet are too sore? Remember one thing: white people are not your friends. They
don’t want to hear about it. And when Miss White Lady catches her man with the lady next door, you keep out of it, you hear me?
“Rule Number Two: don’t you ever let that White Lady find you sitting on her toilet. I don’t care if you’ve got to go so bad it’s coming out of your hairbraids. If there’s not one out back for the help, you find yourself a time when she’s not there in a bathroom she doesn’t use.
“Rule Number Three—” Mama jerked my chin back around to face her because that cake had lured me in again. “Rule Number Three: when
you’re cooking white people’s food, you taste it with a different spoon. You put that spoon to your mouth, think nobody’s looking, put it back in the
pot, might as wel throw it out.
“Rule Number Four: You use the same cup, same fork, same plate every day. Keep it in a separate cupboard and tel that white woman
that’s the one you’l use from here on out.
“Rule Number Five: you eat in the kitchen.
“Rule Number Six: you don’t hit on her children. White people like to do their own spanking.”
“Rule Number Seven: this is the last one, Minny. Are you listening to me? No sass-mouthing.”
“Mama, I know how—”
“Oh, I hear you when you think I can’t, muttering about having to clean the stovepipe, about the last little piece of chicken left for poor Minny.
You sass a white woman in the morning, you’l be sassing out on the street in the afternoon.”
I saw the way my mama acted when Miss Woodra brought her home, al Yes Ma’aming, No Ma’aming, I sure do thank you Ma’aming. Why I
got to be like that? I know how to stand up to people.
“Now come here and give your mama a hug on your birthday—Lord, you are heavy as a house, Minny.”
“I ain’t eaten al day, when can I have my cake?”
“Don’t say ain’t, you speak properly now. I didn’t raise you to talk like a mule.”
First day at my White Lady’s house, I ate my ham sandwich in the kitchen, put my plate up in my spot in the cupboard. When that little brat
stole my pocketbook and hid it in the oven, I didn’t whoop her on the behind.
But when the White Lady said: “Now I want you to be sure and handwash al the clothes first, then put them in the electric machine to finish
up.”
I said: “Why I got to handwash when the power washer gone do the job? That’s the biggest waste a time I ever heard of.”
That White Lady smiled at me, and five minutes later, I was out on the street.
WORKING FOR MISS CELIA, I’l get to see my kids off to Spann Elementary in the morning and stil get home in the evening with time to myself. I haven’t had a nap since Kindra was born in 1957, but with these hours—eight to three—I could have one every day if that was my idea of a fine time. Since
no bus goes al the way out to Miss Celia’s, I have to take Leroy’s car.
“You ain’t taking my car every day, woman, what if I get the day shift and need to—”
“She paying me seventy dol ars cash every Friday, Leroy.”
“Maybe I take Sugar’s bike.”
On Tuesday, the day after the interview, I park the car down the street from Miss Celia’s house, around a curve so you can’t see it. I walk fast
on the empty road and up the drive. No other cars come by.
“I’m here, Miss Celia.” I stick my head in her bedroom that first morning and there she is, propped up on the covers with her makeup perfect
and her tight Friday-night clothes on even though it’s Tuesday, reading the trash in the Hollywood Digest like it’s the Holy B.
“Good morning, Minny! It’s real good to see you,” she says, and I bristle, hearing a white lady being so friendly.
I look around the bedroom, sizing up the job. It’s big, with cream-colored carpet, a yel ow king canopy bed, two fat yel ow chairs. And it’s
neat, with no clothes on the floor. The spread’s made up underneath her. The blanket on the chair’s folded nice. But I watch, I look. I can feel it.
Something’s wrong.
“When can we get to our first cooking lesson?” she asks. “Can we start today?”
“I reckon in a few days, after you go to the store and pick up what we need.”
She thinks about this a second, says, “Maybe you ought to go, Minny, since you know what to buy and al .”
I look at her. Most white women like to do their own shopping. “Alright, I go in the morning, then.”
I spot a smal pink shag rug she’s put on top of the carpet next to the bathroom door. Kind of catty-cornered. I’m no decorator, but I know a
pink rug doesn’t match a yel ow room.
“Miss Celia, fore I get going here, I need to know. Exactly when you planning on tel ing Mister Johnny bout me?”
She eyes the magazine in her lap. “In a few months, I reckon. I ought to know how to cook and stuff by then.”
“By a few, is you meaning two?”
She bites her lipsticky lips. “I was thinking more like…four.”
Say what? I’m not working four months like an escaped criminal. “You ain’t gone tel him til 1963? No ma’am, before Christmas.”
She sighs. “Alright. But right before.”
I do some figuring. “That’s a hundred and…sixteen days then. You gone tel him. A hundred and sixteen days from now.”
She gives me a worried frown. I guess she didn’t expect the maid to be so good at math. Final y she says, “Okay.”
Then I tel her she needs to go on in the living room, let me do my work in here. When she’s gone, I eyebal the room, at how neat it al looks.
Real slow, I open her closet and just like I thought, forty-five things fal down on my head. Then I look under the bed and find enough dirty clothes to where I bet she’s hasn’t washed in months.
Every drawer is a wreck, every hidden cranny ful of dirty clothes and wadded-up stockings. I find fifteen boxes of new shirts for Mister
Johnny so he won’t know she can’t wash and iron. Final y, I lift up that funny-looking pink shag rug. Underneath, there’s a big, deep stain the color of rust. I shudder.
THAT AFTERNOON, Miss Celia and I make a list of what to cook that week, and the next morning I do the grocery shopping. But it takes me twice as long
because I have to drive al the way to the white Jitney Jungle in town instead of the colored Piggly Wiggly by me since I figure she won’t eat food
from a colored grocery store and I reckon I don’t blame her, with the potatoes having inch-long eyes and the milk almost sour. When I get to work,
I’m ready to fight with her over al the reasons I’m late, but there Miss Celia is on the bed like before, smiling like it doesn’t matter. Al dressed up and going nowhere. For five hours she sits there, reading the magazines. The only time I see her get up is for a glass of milk or to pee. But I don’t
ask. I’m just the maid.
After I clean the kitchen, I go in the formal living room. I stop in the doorway and give that grizzly bear a good long stare. He’s seven feet tal
and baring his teeth. His claws are long, curled, witchy-looking. At his feet lays a bone-handled hunting knife. I get closer and see his fur’s nappy
with dust. There’s a cobweb between his jaws.
First, I swat at the dust with my broom, but it’s thick, matted up in his fur. Al this does is move the dust around. So I take a cloth and try and
wipe him down, but I squawk every time that wiry hair touches my hand. White people. I mean, I have cleaned everything from refrigerators to rear ends but what makes that lady think I know how to clean a damn grizzly bear?
I go get the Hoover. I suck the dirt off and except for a few spots where I sucked too hard and thinned him, I think it worked out pretty good.
After I’m done with the bear, I dust the fancy books nobody reads, the Confederate coat buttons, the silver pistol. On a table is a gold picture
frame of Miss Celia and Mister Johnny at the altar and I look close to see what kind of man he is. I’m hoping he’s fat and short-legged in case it
comes to running, but he’s not anywhere close. He’s strong, tal , thick. And he’s no stranger either. Lord. He’s the one who went steady with Miss
Hil y al those years when I first worked for Miss Walters. I never met him, but I saw him enough times to be sure. I shiver, my fears tripling. Because that alone says more about that man than anything.