That first summer after college I return to Wisconsin and live with my parents for the last time.
Mom is a student in her own right now, pursuing at UW Madison the PhD she’d interrupted when Daddy’s work took us from Madison to Reston, Virginia, back in 1977. I know I have to get a job, and look through the classified section of the Wisconsin State Journal to find one. I never dreamed of asking Daddy if I could have a job in his office—the kind of gig many of my college classmates were getting that summer.
I come across corn de-tasseling—a sort of quintessential Wisconsin job that entails walking up and down the rows of corn and removing the pollen-producing tassel from the top of each plant and dropping it to the ground, a manner of cross-pollination. It pays minimum wage, $3.35 per hour.
I show up for work on the outskirts of some farm and ride with ten or so other people—all male, all white—in the back of a truck that threatens to jostle us back and forth and into each other as we make our way out to the crop. But I am strong from rowing crew and can keep my body rigid as the ride tosses us around.
I march up and down the rows de-tasseling the stalks with little fatigue. On our water breaks and lunch break my coworkers eye me with uncertainty. I keep to myself. I hadn’t realized that I should protect myself from the sun and instead had worn a tank top and shorts because of the heat. At the end of the first day I am considerably darker head to toe and the skin on either side of my tank top straps is blistered a purple brown.
At the end of the second day my coworkers and I come in from the field and stand where the crops end and the dirt road leading back to the main road begins. We form a circle around the foreman, who is telling us what we’ll tackle tomorrow. The truck to take us out sits idling. I wipe the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand, look at the wet dark slime that accumulated there, and have an epiphany. I need to work. But I don’t need to do this work. I am a high school graduate, which means I have more options. I quit and get paid right there on the spot: a gross wage of $53.60 netting me $35.90.
I improve my working conditions tremendously by becoming a bus girl at Perkins, a twenty-four-hour diner franchise one step up from a Denny’s. I wear a brown skirt, a white blouse with a little brown tie, and a white ruffled apron. My job is to clear, clean, and set tables and mop the bathroom floors. This job also pays $3.35 an hour. But I had moved from the fields to a building where I can go to the bathroom whenever I need to. I shower when I get home, but when Mark and I make out I still smell a bit like fried food.
Early one evening before the dinner rush begins I am walking through the aisles with my gray dirty-dishes bin and pass a Black male customer seated at a table with two other folk. He calls me over. “Aren’t you George Lythcott’s daughter?” I say yes and smile and make chitchat and he fills in details for his companions. He asks me where I go to college and I tell him. Then I nod in the direction of my manager who is coming toward me, and I sidle over to the nearest table that needs clearing. I put the gray bin on the Formica tabletop and begin piling dishes in.
“She doesn’t have to do this work, you know,” I hear the customer tell my white manager as I’m wiping the table down. “She’ll be a sophomore at Stanford.” I feel a strange discomfort as he says this, like I’ve been outed. I couldn’t have explained it then, but I was trying to prove something with this job. I wanted to punch a clock, work hard, and get a paycheck. I already felt an unease from being able to flit through life using my parents’ name or that of the university I attended. I didn’t want to be given unearned things. A summer spent wearing a uniform and earning minimum wage was a chance to pay some dues that many people who look like me had no choice but to pay.
Yet through my unease I can also hear in his voice that this stranger is happy for me. Proud of me. Proud that I am lifting myself and by extension all of us up and away from this kind of work. He sees me not as a white-talking biracial girl but as a Black kid making it. Maybe the commendation from the College Board wasn’t that inaccurate after all.