HAPPY

Brad Watson

WHEN I WAS a boy in Meridian, Mississippi, my mother, who’d thought she had a happy life of mid-twentieth-century homemaker ahead of her, had to go to work. I was five and not happy about it, but she went anyway. And though my father wasn’t making much money (sometimes none), and she wasn’t going to make much on her new job, she needed a caretaker for my little brother (then one and a half or two) and me, so she hired a maid.

In the South then, if you were a middle-class or even lower-middle-class white family like us, you could hire a maid. The maid would be a black woman, maybe young, maybe not so young. Experience was good, so not too young was best. In any case, the reason a woman like my mother, a mother of very modest means, could hire a woman to look after her children—and cook, clean house, do laundry, handle discipline—five days a week, eight hours a day, was because these women came from a segment of our society in which women pretty much had two “honorable” livelihoods they could pursue: schoolteacher, or what everyone called a maid. (I know maid has long been a common term for a general housekeeper and child-care person. But when you apply it to a fully grown, usually married woman with children of her own, the word takes on a particularly onerous quality.) If the woman had a college education, she likely worked as a schoolteacher. There were jobs in the offices of black male professionals—businessman, dentist, doctor, merchant, etc. But there weren’t many of those jobs.

If the woman did not have a college or even high school education, chances were she worked as a maid in a white household. And because the competition was pretty tough, and because black people had no economic or political power in those days, a white mother/head of household affairs could get away with paying her maid a phenomenally low sum.

There came the day I was old enough to be standing next to my mother when she wrote out the check for our maid’s weekly pay.

Even at that age—I must have been twelve or thirteen—I was flabbergasted. I won’t say how little it was, but I will say that even by then I knew that I could make that much money mowing three yards, and I could make it in one day. I could make, mowing yards, in one day what our maid was paid for a forty-plus-hour week.

And I said something about it. About how I couldn’t believe she paid the maid that little. My mother got angry. She got defensive. “That’s all I can afford to pay her!” she said, upset. And this may very well have been true. If I’d been able to mow four lawns a day five days a week for a month, I would have been able to make more than half of what my mother was making at the clinic where she worked. And she was, in the worst times, supporting a family of five on it.

Still. I’d seen the run-down house where our maid lived with her family. It was pretty much a wooden shack on brick foundation posts. It had no running water. It may have had electricity, but I’m not sure. There was no grass in the yard (until sometime into the twentieth century, of course, no one in the South had grass in their yards except a few town people, so this had very recently been common among country folk, but still).

I brooded over it. But of course I let it go. It wasn’t me paying the maid, who was still needed to look after my younger brother, and whom my mother still needed to help keep the house clean and the laundry washed. It wasn’t my call, finally.

There came the day, though, when my mother accused our maid of stealing our (my and my brothers’) underwear. She’d noticed some underwear missing, more than once, and she came to the conclusion that the maid had to be stealing it. So she fired her.

I remember the morning she fired her. We were backing out of the driveway in my mom’s economical three-on-the-tree small sedan when the maid came charging out of the house toward the car. Before we could pull away, she was on us, shouting into the window past my older brother sitting up front, saying to my mother, “Ms. Watson, I did not steal that underwear, you can’t accuse me of stealing, I’m not a thief, and you can’t call me a thief, you can fire me for whatever you want, but I’m not a thief!” My mother put the car into first gear and drove off. The maid stormed back into the house.

She accepted the firing. Or maybe she quit after being accused. I don’t remember. But I do remember how ashamed I felt at being, even inadvertently, the cause of yet one more humiliation, an outrage, really, toward this woman, who I must say I felt great affection for, even if it was pretty much impossible for me to get to know her, to really get to know her. We lived in different worlds, in those days. Especially the very poor black and the middle- (even lower-middle-) class white. Any black and white, really.

I remember thinking, If her children don’t have underwear, she can have my underwear. I don’t care if she steals my underwear. It’s not right to fire a woman because she can’t afford to buy her children underwear, and that she can’t afford to do that because she has to work for wages about five times less than what an adolescent white boy could make for less skilled labor than she was doing.

There was nothing I could do to rectify the situation. My mother hired a new maid, not nearly so nice or efficient as the one who quit or got fired.

Years later, I saw the first maid, the good maid, at a bus stop. She was wearing a hospital worker uniform. She had a pretty good job. But I can practically guarantee it was one of the lowest-paying, if not the lowest-paying, job in that place.

She was happy to see me. She sure seemed so, anyway. And there was no real reason anymore for her to pretend that she was.