Like One of the Family (2 page)

In its conversational form,
Like One of the Family
is an example of one of the patterns of interactions so characteristic of women who frequently integrated art into their life-styles. Women who did not have the leisure to compose and who did not consider themselves artists in any traditional sense of the word made art out of conversation in the way that Paule Marshall relates the women did in the West Indian community in which she grew up in New York. And as Kathryn Morgan maintains of the storytelling process that enabled her to learn of her infamous great-grandmother Caddy and eventually to write a book about her, the stories “were usually told in the kitchen while my mother was preparing a meal or performing some other chore. She never sat to tell them and sometimes we would have to follow her from room to room to hear the end of a legend.”
⁶
The careful words, the artistic turns, the striking images—all were relevant to making order out of chaos, to shaping an imaginative response to a world that often stifled imagination.

In the traditional places that characterize the differences between the gathering and storytelling sites of men and women, kitchens become comparable to barbershops and cooking takes the place of shooting pool. Instead of moving out of the usual realms of their environments to share experiences with others, women frequently tell their tales where they are—in the dining room or living room while they are shelling beans for dinner, ironing, or while chastising their children (indeed, the stories might be instructional in the chastisement). Tasks do not interfere with performance, and art and life are synonymous. So too with Mildred and Marge; they make no distinction between art as life and art as artifact. Creativity is not something that they put on and take off as occasion warrants.

The alternate endings to
Trouble in Mind
, which preceded the publication of the first Mildred conversations, establish a precedent for the delicate balance Childress tries to maintain in
Like One of the Family
. Her conversations hover precariously between wish fulfillment and reality, between the desire of the person of low social status to be self-assertive and concern with the potential consequences of such behavior, In all her adventures with her white employers, Mildred the maid is a combination of lady in shining armor charging off to attack insensitive racist infidels and the black woman of flesh and blood who knows that a direct confrontation with her white employers could lead to physical violence against her as quickly as it could lead to her dismissal. Day workers were noted for quitting, not showing up, or telling off the inconsiderate. They did not rely on long-term situations.

Childress chooses to depict a day worker rather than the “old faithful” family servant, to push the limits of possibility for what a black domestic in the mid-twentieth century demanded of her employers. In the sixty-two conversations in this volume, Childress allows Mildred to discuss a range of topics that others might judge antithetical to a domestic's intellectual ken, and the character raises issues that others would perhaps have her overlook. Mildred begins with many stereotypical attitudes and concepts about blacks and consistently refutes them when they violate her humanity. She is especially iconoclastic about historical notions of where she should and should not be—both psychologically and physically.

The concept of physical space—and its attendant psychological implications—has as its basis the broad concept of place for all blacks. Place can refer to status, to physical location, or to both. Status encompasses the sense of place slaves very quickly learned was expected of them; status and physical location include the sense of place the sharecropper landlord consigned to his black tenants, as well as the sense of place the blacks on southern buses were taught was theirs. Place in any context espouses the hierarchy of masters and slaves, owners and owned, privileged and nonprivileged.
⁷

By directly confronting her employers in a violation of the expected behavior of domestics, Mildred adds the psychological disturbance to the physical disturbances she effects by meeting them in their living rooms. In the initial, title conversation, “Like One of the Family,” Mildred challenges that time-honored lie about domestic workers as she simultaneously violates physical space. Her white employer brags to a visiting friend about Mildred: “We just
love
her! She's
like
one of the family and she
just adores
our little Carol! We don't know
what
we'd do without her! We don't think of her as a servant!” Mildred explodes the myth by asserting that she has none of the privileges of one of the family, not even the dog, for it can sleep on the “satin spread” where Mildred cannot; the child is “likable” rather than adorable, “but she is also fresh and sassy,” forcing Mildred to restrain herself from spanking her on occasions. But Mildred's tour de force comes in her description of the work apportioned to various family members, especially the black one: “After I have worked myself into a sweat cleaning the bathroom and the kitchen … making the beds … cooking the lunch … washing the dishes and ironing Carol's pinafores, … I do not feel like no weekend house guest. I feel like a servant.” And Mildred uses the occasion to demand better wages and more respect.

In “Let's Face It,” Mildred further rejects the concept of physical spatial limitations; she deliberately sits down in the presence of a visiting white southerner who is lecturing her on the proper place for “Nigras.” He has waited restlessly for the opportunity to talk with Mildred because he has stereotyped her as the “right” sort of “Nigra.” He has called her “sister” (tantamount to “Auntie”) and has complimented her on the good, stable sort she seems to be in these changing times. Because of examples like her, he is not losing his faith in “Nigras.” Mildred then shocks the man by sitting in a big leather chair opposite him in the living room. When he relates the tale of one of his colored friends, a black minister, the epitome of an Uncle Tom, she upsets him further by threatening to go to Alabama and whip his model “Nigra.” By settling herself in the living room of the white family for whom she works, at the same eye level with the guest and in a chair similar to his, Mildred eradicates the physical symbols of inequality. In being sassy, she refuses to recognize psychological inequality. In this case and others, she is
driven
to stand up for her rights.

Mildred also redefines physical and psychological boundaries in “Interestin' and Amusin'.” Given a small amount of time to do some yea-saying, she uses it to make a nay-saying speech on World War II. Serving at a buffet cocktail party for Mrs. H., Mildred is struck by the company's overuse of the words “wonderful” and “amusing.” When the hostess asks Mildred's opinion, having cooed to her guests about how
wonderful
Mildred is, she opts for a response that will eliminate the hint of laughter from those who clearly find her “amusin'.” When Mrs. H. tries to shush her after Mildred claims a motherly interest in all young people, not just young men going off to die, she ignores her and continues: “I do not want to see people's blood and bones spattered about the streets and I do not want to see your eyes runnin' outta your head like water…. When there is true peace we'll have different notions about what is
amusin'
because
mankind
will be
wonderful.”

By putting Mildred on the side of life, meaning, and substance, and by placing her in the living room, Childress succeeds in passing judgment on the people at the cocktail party who really engage in none of those things. Mildred, the assumed bottom rail culturally and intellectually, becomes the top rail morally and racially, for as a black maid Mildred represents blacks whether she wants to or not. But representative as she is, she is also decidedly individual. She has her individual triumph as the audience recognizes the truth and seriousness of what she says in contrast to the falsity and triviality of what the whites have said. One
Mildred
, a black maid whom they have considered inconsequential and utterly lacking in intelligence, turns the intellectual tables on them all.

Debunking myths and demanding change—that is the pattern of interaction throughout
Like One of the Family
. Childress allows Mildred to violate all the requirements for silence and invisibility that were historically characteristic of domestics. Mildred questions authority by confronting white women about their child-rearing habits in “Inhibitions” and gives them helpful hints on raising children in “Listen for the Music.” Mildred also forces her white employers to confront specific stereotypes they have about black people. In “The Health Card,” a white woman indicates her stereotyped belief that blacks are unclean and unhealthy by asking Mildred to show proof of the status of her health. She believes that her family can contract germs from Mildred because she lives in “filthy” Harlem. Unabashed, Mildred lets the woman know that she expects the same show of health cards from her and her family. Indeed, one must be careful, Mildred exclaims to the woman, “and I am glad you are so understandin', 'cause I was just worryin' and studyin' on how I was goin' to ask you for yours, and of course you'll let me see one from your husband and one for each of the three children … Since I have to handle laundry and make beds, you know …” Mildred's ploy succeeds; as the two women stand there smiling at each other, the white woman guiltily and Mildred indulgently, perhaps they construct a bond that emphasizes their mutual humanity. At least, that is the intention of the encounter.
⁸

Mildred insists, further, upon polite requests and respectful actions from the children, as in “Inhibitions.” She does not believe it is the maid's responsibility to allow a child to play in the hamburger that everyone has to eat for dinner. The child's temper tantrum and the white woman's frustration and plea for leniency only intensify the problem. Mildred finds herself confronting two children rather than an adult and a child. The mother can finally see the problem she has created, but only because Mildred pushes the limits of authority and politeness. A similar focus on politeness underscores “Mrs. James.” The white woman in this conversation refers to herself in the third person to emphasize to Mildred the distance between them and the formal courtesy she expects. Mildred takes the occasion to let Mrs. James know that black women deserve the titles of “Mrs.” or “Miss” as much as white women do.

Mildred constantly challenges the use and abuse of black domestics. In “I Hate Half-Days Off,” she recognizes the need for collective representation to protect domestics from excessive labor. A white woman interviews Mildred for a job and describes work days that will begin before breakfast and end “after the supper dishes”; she describes the half-days off with a calculation typical of devious politicians: “Well, you have one half-day off every Tuesday and one half-day off every Sunday and every other Thursday you get a full day off, which makes it a five and a half day week.” The woman also has a cagey plan to pay only on the first and the fifteenth day of each month so that she can get a free week's work. Of such “brilliance,” Mildred sarcastically concludes: “How come all of them big-shots in Washington that can't balance the budget or make the taxes cover all our expenses, how
come
they don't send for that woman to help straighten them out?” Mildred also recognizes the need for organized representation for black domestics in “We Need a Union Too.”

In “On Leaving Notes,” again a white employer tries to trick Mildred into extra work. At the end of the day, just as Mildred is leaving, she finds a note pinned to three house dresses. The woman has requested that Mildred take them home, wash and iron them, and return them the next day; she has appended a dollar to the lot, considerably less than the seventy-five cents per housecoat that the nearby laundry charges. The work is outside the agreement Mildred has with the woman; therefore, she leaves the mess and complains the next day of the attempted exploitation. Mildred is consistent and generally effective in her bids to protect her labor and to bring about change in the process.

Interspersed throughout the conversations is a strong nationalistic pride as well as a simple philosophy for living. Mildred values black people, especially black children, and she is touched acutely by the prejudices that affect them. This is particularly evident in “Ain't You Mad?” but also in conversations such as “Got to Go Someplace,” in which she laments the lack of public recreational spaces for black people. But Mildred also stresses interpersonal and communal sharing, evident in her recounting work experiences to Marge, attending funerals (“I Go to a Funeral”), visiting friends (“Weekend with Pearl”), and going to parties (“Dance with Me, Henry”). She expresses a poetic sensibility in “I Wish I Was a Poet,” and, throughout the conversations, she generally exudes a joy at being alive.

More often than not, Mildred is able to make her points in relatively polite and certainly witty ways. Not so in “Ain't You Mad?” The racial anger underlying many of the conversations surfaces overtly in this one, and it is here that Childress comes closest to being a propagandist; the message is consciously allowed to become more important than art and direct lecturing takes the place of witty manipulation. Mr. and Mrs. B. complacently insist over their leisurely breakfast that “you people,” meaning blacks, must be angry about a recent attempt to integrate a white university. When Mr. B. asks Mildred what is to be done, her reaction approaches violence. She “hollers” rather than attempting her usual ploy of moral suasion: “What the hamfat is the matter with you?
Ain't you mad?
Now you either be
mad
or
shame
, but don't you sit there with your mouth full 'tut-tuttin' at me! Now if you mad, you'd of told me what
you done
and if you shame, you oughta be hangin' your head instead of smackin' your lips over them goodies!” Further screaming and disagreement ensue, with Mildred comparing the helpless woman trying to integrate the school to Mrs. B., who would have the law and the Klan to assist her if she were threatened. The ugly encounter continues until Mrs. B. jumps up, waves a newspaper in Mildred's face, and insists that she go home. It is at this point that Mildred angrily snatches the newspaper and offers parting advice on the responsibility of all human beings to make the world a better place.