She’d just shown up, saying she’d heard that Mr. Fong needed a washerwoman and chambermaid. They did not know she had heard it from some of the people had been around her sorry husband, Reece, who’d done some business of one kind or another for the Chinaman.
Pearl was hard working and bright and she’d brought her little boy with her, not that it was the proper place for him, or her, or them either, but he knew how to keep out of the way when he should, and how to make everybody’s day brighter with his smiling and talking and everything while Pearl washed and swept and swabbed and emptied and aired out and listened.
Mistaking her for a wayfaring innocent, the girls—Victoria, White Mary, Iris, Sara, and Alice, and sometimes Ilene—took her under their ruffled wing. She listened to their stories of what not to do, paths not to take, temptations to avoid, and ways not to be in order not to follow their fate.
Then, after not too long, they listened to her and her story. Her husband. What he did. How she couldn’t stand it anymore. How she got away from him but had no place to go. How she and her son were turned away from door after door of houses, businesses, and churches until they arrived at Mr. Fong’s establishment and were taken in. They listened when she told them she wasn’t going keep on being treated the way she had been, and added, they didn’t either, far as that went.
What?
Then she told them who they were: they were the flowers that attracted the bees, it was their honey made the money, and although they only believed her a little bit they began to listen to her to save and savor as much as they could while they could, because they knew, in their innate knowing, that one day the mother and son would be gone, a long way from there, and not south. They didn’t know how, but they believed Pearl did, and that they—Victoria, White Mary, Sara, Iris, and Alice, and sometimes, depending on the demand, Ilene—would still be in Mr. Fong’s, or on the outskirts of some place worse, if they were anywhere at all.
They asked her things and got straight, commonsense answers that anybody else would have given them if they’d had anybody else to ask, not that they could do anything with the advice, being as they were stuck and sinking where they were, doing what they were doing.
Little by little they came to believe Pearl had more husk, was the smartest and maybe savviest and surely the least afraid of any colored woman they had ever known, and could do something they couldn’t do, she could reach the Chinaman in his fewer and fewer moments of clarity in the cloud of dope smoke he floated in night and day. They believed she could make the Chinaman listen to her—and maybe even make something happen, and none among them might could do that.
It wasn’t much they were asking, knowing it wasn’t much they were going to get, but what there was, it was Pearl was their go-between, speaking on their behalf, taking their side, putting it so the Chinaman could see how it was to his benefit.
—What—?
A less contentious whore, she reminded Mr. Fong, was a harder working whore. She told him that fines for infractions rather than beatings, that an extra day for the girls’ monthlies, that an occasional kind word would, overall, improve their dispositions. It would keep things from all the time being upset. He would have more satisfied girls, more satisfied customers, and more coins for his big boss, the Kimbrough Company’s coffer.
It all must have made some sense to the Chinaman because he didn’t stop her or the girls from any of their suggestions, and things quieted down and business picked up.