Carla, the Drapers’ dignified, wise, and unflappable housekeeper, is a rock of stability in a household coming apart at the seams. She cleans, cooks, takes care of the children, and suffers Betty’s occasional haughtiness while retaining a stolid self-respect. When Betty’s irascible father, Gene Hofstadt, is forced to move in with the Drapers because of his early-stage dementia, he often confuses Carla with Viola, a maid who worked in the Hofstadt household. Carla politely but firmly corrects him.
The early 1960s, of course, was a time of great racial turmoil in the United States. The civil rights movement was taking root, but the world of Sterling Cooper floats serenely above it all with one notable exception. The only African American employee we see in the office building that houses Sterling Cooper, elevator operator Hollis, reluctantly becomes a focus group of one when Pete Campbell grills him about the type of television he owns and why he bought it. Pete is hoping to gain some insight from Hollis about sales figures he’s reviewing for Admiral, an appliance maker and Sterling Cooper client. Admiral’s television sales are flat except in predominantly black communities, where they are climbing. The executives at Admiral are reluctant to be seen as the choice of “Negroes” but Pete, ever practical, familiarizes himself with the market by reading Ebony and Jet, magazines for African Americans founded in 1945 and 1951, respectively, and urges Admiral to seize the business opportunity.
The civil rights struggle is evoked poignantly in several episodes. For example, in season 3, episode 9 (“Wee Small Hours”), we see Carla in the Drapers’ kitchen listening to the radio as Martin Luther King eulogizes four young African American girls killed during the firebombing of a church in Birmingham in September of 1963. When Betty offers Carla the rest of the day off, she declines. ”I hate to say this,” says Betty, ”but it’s really made me wonder about civil rights. Maybe it’s not supposed to happen right now.” In the same episode, Suzanne Farrell, Sally’s teacher and a woman soon to become romantically involved with Don, tells him she plans to have her students read Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech after we hear parts of it on Don’s car radio. In season 4, episode 1 (“Public Relations”), Don dates a young woman named Bethany Van Nuys who tells him a friend of hers went to summer camp with Andrew Goodman, one of three young civil rights workers—James Cheney and Michael Schwerner were the others—murdered in Mississippi in 1964. And both Lane Pryce and Paul Kinsey have interracial relationships, considered rather avant garde at the time. Even so, they are hardly colorblind: Lane refers to his girlfriend, a cocktail waitress at the Playboy Club, as his “chocolate bunny.” The ever self-conscious Paul, always striving to hone his Bohemian image, even makes a trip to Mississippi with his girlfriend to engage in the civil rights struggle (season 2, episode 10; “The Inheritance”), though she breaks up with him when she becomes aware that part of her appeal is to burnish his liberal hipster credentials.
But it is Carla, strong, reserved, and dignified, who most embodies in Mad Men the separate world of black and white in the early 1960s.
One morning in September 1963, the confused Gene believes he’s been assigned KP duty (he’s a World War I veteran) and leaves a bowl filled with peeled potatoes on the Drapers’ kitchen counter. That night, when Carla serves dinner to Gene and the Draper children, she has turned those potatoes into a sumptuous potato salad. For Carla’s Potato Salad we turned to The Ebony Cookbook: A Date with a Dish by Freda DeKnight (1962), first published in 1948 as “A Date with a Dish,” the name of a regular food column that appeared in Ebony. DeKnight, who developed recipes for food manufacturers and was Ebony’s food editor, was one of the first women to advocate for African American culinary heritage. “There are no set rules for dishes created by most Negroes,” wrote the author in a short preface. “They just seem to have a ‘way’ of taking a plain everyday dish and improvising a gourmet’s delight.” While her words may sound a bit dated to modern ears, when you taste Carla’s Potato Salad you’ll see that Freda DeKnight was spot on.
FROM THE EBONY COOK BOOK: A DATE WITH A DISH BY FREDA DEKNIGHT (JOHNSON PUBLISHING, 1962)
1⁄2 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons mustard
2 tablespoons sour cream
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
Salt
Ground black pepper
1 grated onion
1⁄2 cup chopped celery
1⁄2 cup minced parsley
2 hard-cooked eggs, cut into wedges, or chopped
2 cups diced cooked potatoes
YIELD: 6 SERVINGS