In addition to all the other women in my life, there was Maggie Hale, who for some years was a member of our household—or at least I thought of her as that. She was, at least nominally, our maid, but to me she was far more. This black woman came into my life when I was an infant. Perhaps because my mother was rather old for child-bearing, she had problems producing sufficient milk for me. And that is when Maggie was pressed into service. It was at her teat that I suckled the most.
Of course, I do not recall that experience, but in my earliest memories I can see Maggie entering through the back door. A tall, chunky woman, she wore a bandanna of red and white checks, tied tightly in the back. If she was wearing her coat, she would hang it on a hook inside the broom closet on the back porch. Then she would take a white apron hanging on a nail and put it on over her shift and full long skirts. She was ready for her day. “Good morning, Mr. Stanley. Good morning, Miss Ethel,” she would call out as she entered the kitchen.
I can see her in the kitchen putting coal in the water heater. Although she always washed the coal dust from her hands, I can still picture her going to wipe her hands on “her” towel. It did not seem particularly strange to me that she was not allowed to use the family towels. I also remember how by the end of the day her white apron had black dusty streaks on it. But she kept the kitchen itself spotless.
Maggie was not pretty, but she had a great smile. One side of her lips rose higher than the other because her first husband had cut her with a switchblade. He caught her just left of her eye, making a deep gash down the left of her nose and on down to the side of her mouth. The definitive scar was pink and shiny, and that side of her mouth was higher than the other when it healed. But the most unusual thing about Maggie was that a quarter of her right ear was gone, bitten off by the same man who cut her. Maggie did not try to hide the mangled ear, wearing a gold earring on it as well as on the complete one.
When I was just a small child, Maggie began referring to me as “Mr. Mike” when she spoke about me to my parents or called my name in their presence. After they left for work, and especially when she needed to be firm with me, she dropped the Mr. When things got real serious, she called me boy. When I heard that, I knew to get ready for some sort of punishment. She would never have laid a hand on me, so she adopted my mother’s favorite mode of punishment—sending me to the bathroom. Early on I learned to keep toys hidden under the claw-foot tub, and later I learned the rope escape, so that never was much punishment at all.
Maggie did everything around the house—cleaning, sweeping the porch and sidewalk, tending to me and walking me to school, telling me stories, cooking (when Momma was not there), and ironing our clothes. Maggie did not have to wash, as Mother took the laundry uptown to the shop.
Maggie, I was told, lived with her husband “’cross the creek.” To many people, that meant “nigger quarters,” but we didn’t say that in my house. From a very early age I heard the word constantly and even used it myself, but not in our house. Dad taught me that when I addressed Taft Farrington, Gene Prentice, and Rose Cottingham, I was to say Mr. Taft, Mr. Gene, and Miss Rose. That really applied to the older black people I knew, except for the blacks we were extremely close to, like Maggie. I could call black children my age by their given names, so they were Cary or Peanut or Lightning.
Maggie lived ’cross the creek until during World War II, when her husband was drafted into the army. Maggie didn’t have enough money for rent and food, so Mother and Dad began to figure what they could do to help her. Mr. Pete Givhan had built a garage between our house and Bloomer Wilson’s, and, since we didn’t have a car to put in it, it was unused. “Do we dare to fix that up and move Maggie into it?” Dad asked, and he and Mother decided that if Sam and Rose Klotzman on Highland Avenue could have their maid living in their backyard then we could too.
Dad bought some lumber and got Harry Miller, a shoeshine boy at his shop, to help him put in a floor and to install a door and one window. He nailed up the large garage door and cut a smaller opening in the middle of it, using the planks he had cut out to fashion the door, which he placed on runners so it could slide open and shut. He used the same procedure for the window. He did all this work with a handsaw and a few other simple tools. There was no glass in the window, and I wondered how Maggie could see out. Dad showed me how she could open the window, but I thought that wouldn’t work very well in the wintertime.
It was late fall when he fixed up the garage for Maggie, and Dad feared that the room would have wind blowing through it. Maggie said he should fill all the cracks with newspaper, and that is what they did. Then they covered it over with heavy wallpaper with big white magnolias on it, tacking it up rather than gluing it. After Maggie pronounced it quite warm and said it looked wonderful, they set about furnishing the room. Maggie brought a little table and a couple of chairs with her, and Mother and Dad found a bed, a small dresser, and a chifforobe with a round mirror in the top. Maggie ran a wire across one corner of the room and hung clothes on it, covering them over with a white sheet.
Dad had Mr. H. G. Parker run an electric wire from our back porch to the garage so that the room could be lit by a single light bulb hanging in the middle of the room. The place had a tin roof and no insulation, so it could get either very cold or very hot in there. Dad installed a small stove for warmth. The stove looked similar to the four-legged monster in our kitchen, but it was not a water heater and did not need a silver water tank. Maggie’s stove burned coal, and of course she used our coal from the coal shed. She was very pleased with her stove because she not only could keep warm, but she could even cook on her stove if need be.
For the hot weather, Dad bought Maggie a brass-plated General Electric oscillating fan, which she would plug in to one side of a two-way plug connected to the light bulb socket. If she wanted to run the fan during the night without the light, she had to reach up and unscrew the light bulb. The fan seemed to me far preferable to the ones we had in our house, and I wondered why Dad didn’t take Maggie’s fine fan for us and replace it with one of our old black ones.
All in all, Maggie’s place was quite cozy, and I recall going in the room at night and being charmed by the glow from the light bulb, casting a rich rose light over the furniture and walls covered with Maggie’s magnolia wallpaper. And when the oscillating fan was on, there was a low hum I found mesmerizing.
Although at the outset Mother and Dad had worried a bit about what the neighbors would think, once Maggie moved in she was welcomed by all of them. Even though her friends were ’cross the creek, she seemed happy. Of course she still came in the back door, never in the front—she could leave by the front door to clean the porch or sweep the sidewalk, but she could not enter the front door. Maggie had her own dishes in her place in the kitchen, but on lots of occasions she was invited to eat at the table with Mother and me. I liked those occasions. Often, however, Maggie would wait until we finished eating and then sit alone, eating the leftovers from the stove.
After World War II ended, Maggie’s husband came home, and shortly thereafter Maggie told us she was leaving and moving to Detroit, Michigan. To say the least, this was a shock. How could she leave us? Some crude neighbors said, “Just like a nigger, she didn’t know how good she had it,” that Dad and Mother had always overdone for her, and she was ungrateful. But whatever her reasons for going, there were tears on both sides when Maggie left. We knew very well how lucky we were to have loved and been loved by Maggie, and, though we seldom heard from her over the years, we never relinquished her place in our hearts and minds.
After Maggie left, Mother and Dad were without help for a while. They hired other women, but none stayed long until they hired Leonora, a tall thin lady, thought to be dignified and beautiful by most who knew her. I remember how gracefully she walked down the street. She lived across the little red bridge on Depot Street, which ran parallel to the railroad tracks.
Leonora arrived at our house early enough in the morning to cook breakfast and see Mother and Dad off to work. She did our washing in a new wringer washing machine, which sounded like a snare drum when it was running: para diddle, para diddle, para diddle, slam slam. I especially liked watching Leonora feed the wet clothes through the two rubber rollers above the tub, with water and soap bubbles squishing out into the tub. Then Leonora pressed a button and the dirty water was pumped out a black runner hose into a grease trap Mr. Shorty Smitherman had installed in the yard. After that Leonora had to take the clothes in a #2 galvanized tub and hang them in the yard. Washing was not a simple matter in those days.
Leonora stayed with us several years, but a new opportunity came available at Alabama College and she was hired as one of the maids at Flower Hill, the beautiful home of the president. Mother and Dad were happy for her, thinking that her smiling face would fit in perfectly in such elegant surroundings. This was certainly a prized job, and even as a boy I thought Leonora looked right at home as she walked up the brick drive to Flower Hill, under the arch of pecan trees lining the drive.