Like One of the Family (3 page)

Mildred represents conscience and concern, her employers insensitivity and condescension. By noting the casual way Mr. B. finishes the “last piece of buttered, jellied toast” and the offhand way Mrs. B. swashes down her bacon “with a gulp of coffee” as they consider the wretchedness in Alabama, Mildred emphasizes the distance between black and white: between the security, stability, and complacency of the B.s' life on the one hand and the insecurity and disruption that Autherine Lucy must have been experiencing—insecurity and disruption that Mildred herself shakes at the thought of—on the other.
⁹
Mildred selects detail here to make the B.s seem like villains whose place in society prevents them from ever sympathizing with or even understanding what vitally concerns the black community.

“Ain't You Mad?” is the only conversation in which Mildred is sent home. Significantly, she is not fired though she radically violates every sort of spatial boundary set for the domestic; but it is also significant that only in this conversation do she and her employers fail to reach a new level of understanding. Usually, the people she enlightens as to their ignorance accept their enlightenment. They are shocked that they have been so narrowminded concerning racial issues; they evince an eagerness to change. They and Mildred recognize their mutual humanity and Mildred works harmoniously with them for at least a few more days or weeks—a pattern which might occur once or twice in real life, especially in Mildred's New York and in the life of a maid with so vivacious a personality as Mildred's, but which surely could not be the norm. “Ain't You Mad?” is striking, therefore, in that it is the least realistic confrontation in the conversations, yet it has the most realistic, least optimistic ending.

It is significant that the conversations were initially published in Paul Robeson's newspaper
Freedom
under the title “Conversation from Life” and continued in the
Baltimore Afro-American
, as “Here's Mildred,” for audience is a key factor in how the episodes are developed. In creating Mildred, a heroine of the black working class, Childress may have been influenced by Langston Hughes's Jesse B. Simple, another heroic figure conceived for audience approval and interaction. Serialized in the
Chicago Defender
, Hughes's tales featured a gregarious, beer-loving, bar-hopping Harlemite who shared his adventures in the white world and his homely philosophies with a meticulously correct black man named Boyd, who usually provided the motivating frame for Simple's reflections. Indeed, as early as 1950, Childress adapted Hughes's
Simple Speaks His Mind
for the stage in a show entitled
Just a Little Simple
, With his commonsense philosophy and his belief in dignity for all human beings, Simple shares with Mildred a recognition that human value must not be determined by one's status in a society.

It was appropriate that Childress's conversations should originally appear in
Freedom
, for they were militant in nature. Her iconoclastic portraits of a working-class woman who fought her exploitative situations in very creative ways touched close to the proletarian themes which were historically true of black characters in American history—Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman. Mildred's militancy, therefore, could have been viewed in the larger, worldwide political context of breaking the yoke of the bourgeoisie on the masses of workers. Childress says that she “wrote the pieces originally for Paul Robeson's newspaper
Freedom
for no compensation at all, then for five dollars per column. The
Baltimore Afro-American
ran them all (one per week) for twenty-five dollars each and then I wrote new ones for them (unpublished) for the next year or two.”
¹⁰

Mildred identifies herself as a
Negro
(as did the earlier nationalist Marcus Garvey), yet many of her actions equal or surpass those of the consciously militant blacks and Afro-Americans of the 1960s. Her nationalistic sentiments would be echoed later in the writings of Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez, and her concerns about South Africa anticipated what is a prevailing concern in the 1980s. The term that would later be assigned to complacent middle-class blacks, therefore, did not at all apply in substance to the vivacious, racially conscious Mildred as she paraded across the pages of the
Baltimore Afro-American
.

The many domestic workers who subscribed to that paper and who found themselves in situations equally or more restricting than Mildred's could applaud her victories; the conversations thereby transcended their individuality and responded to a collective consciousness. When Mildred says no, sometimes in thunder and always with humor, the domestic workers who could and could not do so had found their voice. Those who managed to protest against overwork and general physical abuse found some new stratagems to employ after reading about Mildred's exploits. And perhaps there were others who were so much a part of the families for which they worked that Mildred's feats simply seemed incredible. Whatever the gamut of responses, the column brought to light the daily problems of the little people, the invisible people, those who don't seem to matter statistically but who, like those in Douglas Turner Ward's
Day of Absence
(1966), have in reality the capacity to stop the worlds in which they work from functioning. Ward's domestics and other “menial” workers go on strike one day and cause such confusion among the whites that they riot. Childress says that in reaction to her column, “floods of beautiful mail came in from domestics (male and female) telling me of their own experiences.” They gave their approval to Mildred's exploits and escapades and then told their own stories of protest.

With this audience-based sense of performance, then, Childress could incorporate her theatrical background into the showman's side of Mildred's personality, and she could co-opt this traditional medium to present her depictions of Mildred. In newspapers, therefore, Mildred is a stage personality, performing for her readers as she performs for Marge and for those of us who read of her exploits today. On stage, she creates a legend of herself, one that we can question, alter, or correct, but one that we cannot deny her in the process of creation, for that process is solely within her control. We may fuss and fume at being held outside—like the situation of the storyteller who allows us to identify with his hero, but who will not allow us to add, subtract, or correct him
while he is in the process of relating the tale—
but such is the nature of Childress's artistry at work in the newspapers and in
Like One of the Family
.

The collection of monologues was originally issued by a small Brooklyn-based publisher in 1956. The publishing history of the volume demonstrates the exploitation of women writers endemic to the publishing industry. Childress is stoic in describing her experience: “I never received a penny in advance from the book from the publisher and not a dime in royalties. He also sold the German rights and other European rights without my consent. A lawsuit would not have paid for the legal fees required. I have been compensated by pieces taken from the book and used in school books—particularly ‘The Pocketbook Game' and ‘The Health Card'—here and abroad.” The named conversations illustrate, in their tremendous popularity, the wit and humor of a writer who refused to be undone by the foibles of individuals who would not be fair with her. And, ironically, such exploitation allowed Mildred's voice to be heard by the select few who would listen; her sass cannot be weighed in gold.

Perhaps those in a position to review the original publication chose not to do so because of Childress's former association with Robeson, or perhaps they chose to ignore it because it went against the prevailing grain of the time. Whatever the reason,
Like One of the Family—
as near as I have been able to uncover—was reviewed only once in the four years following its publication. That lone review appeared in
Masses and Mainstream
in July 1956,
¹¹
an appropriate place considering the history of that journal and Childress's personal history. Mildred's fans from the newspaper might have been aware of the volume, but no black journal voiced a response to it, although Richard Wright's
Pagan Spain
and James Baldwin's
Giovanni's Room
were both reviewed in black magazines such as
The Crisis
in 1956. If the maids and butlers who applauded Mildred in
Freedom
and the
Baltimore Afro-American
did not know that the book had been published, then Mildred was lost to them as well. The volume apparently went underground, and only a few copies remained to document Mildred's voice, one of which I was lucky enough to acquire in 1979.

The voice that Childress found in Mildred resonates in the characters of her subsequent books: in Benjie's independence and (sometimes wrongheaded) defiance in
A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich
(1973), in Cora James's refusal to give the slaveholders any more of her soul in
A Short Walk
(1979), and in Rainbow's decision to give up the prettiest boy on the block rather than demean herself in
Rainbow Jordan
(1981). Mildred's concern for children is echoed in the books that Childress has written for them, including
When the Rattlesnake Sounds
(1975), about Harriet Tubman, and
Let's Hear It for the Queen
(1976), which Childress wrote in celebration of her granddaughter's eighth birthday.

In most of her adolescent and adult writings, Childress presents material judged to be controversial, so much so that reactionaries have banned them from the reading public. In the 1970s,
A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich
, which deals with the drug addiction of a thirteen-year-old, was the first book banned in a Savannah, Georgia, school library since
Catcher in the Rye
was banned in the fifties. Childress says it was also among nine books banned in the “Island Trees” court case concerning the selection and rejection of school library literature. After a Supreme Court hearing her book was returned to the shelves of the Hand Trees Library along with the others.
Wedding Band
, a play about an interracial love affair written early in the 1960s, was first presented by the Mendelssohn Theatre, at the University of Michigan. Joseph Papp produced
Wedding Band
in 1973 at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and he also produced it for ABC television with Childress's screenplay. When it finally aired on prime time television, eight of the 168 television stations in the viewing area would not carry it, and another three showed it only after midnight. Another sixties play,
Wine in the Wilderness
, which depicts several young blacks coming to a true understanding of their identity while a riot is going on, was banned from television in Alabama. Such negative public reaction to Childress's works reflects a refusal to see blacks as human, a stance that Childress consistently undercuts in the voice of Mildred.

The significance of Mildred's voice is obvious. Childress lets us hear the many women in Afro-American history whose occupations have silenced them. Through Mildred, we are again aware of numerous indignities that the majority of black women workers in this country experienced, for, indeed, the majority of them were domestic workers. While certainly some of the southern experiences differed from the northern ones in degree, they did not differ in kind. The women were uniformly overworked, expected to neglect their families for those of their white employers, and frequently expected to accept hand-me-downs and service pans—the name for leftover food domestic workers were given to take home to their families—instead of remuneration for their extensive expenditure of labor. By daring to look low, to depict another character type in Afro-American fiction, Childress gave to the literature a dimension that it had rarely had before.

Notwithstanding the silence surrounding the publication of the volume, Childress's creation of Mildred, a working-class black woman who commanded the attention of a volume rather than a part of it, was unlike anything preceding it in Afro-American literature. The tradition of the tragic mulatto in the nineteenth century required idealized, overly educated, overly sentimentalized portraits of black women. The plantation tradition to which Charles Waddell Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar reacted required stylized figures, familiar stereotypes such as Mammy Jane Letlow in Chesnutt's
The Marrow of Tradition
(1901), and only fleeting glimpses of more complex female characters. More complex characters, such as Irene Redfield in Nella Larsen's
Passing
(1929), share some of the extraterrestrial features of their nineteenth-century sisters in accomplishments, beauty, and separation from the masses of blacks. Only Janie Crawford in Zora Neale Hurston's
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937) and Lutie Johnson in Ann Petry's
The Street
(1946) came close to realistic presentation of working-class characters without middle-class embellishments, but even Janie is supported by a middle-class husband and Lutie's vision is marred by an unwavering adherence to the destructive preachments of the American Dream. Nor is Mildred bogged down in the quagmire of judging herself by a standard of physical beauty antithetical to her racial background, as is the case with Gwendolyn Brooks's
Maud Martha
, which appeared in 1953.

Mildred breaks the mold of casting black women as alien to or bemoaning their own experiences in order to make them acceptable to white audiences. She was conceived to reflect as exactly as literature ever imitates life the experiences of those who would be reading about her. Her difficulties on the job tie her most closely to the black masses, but her conversations about social situations as well as her own personal circumstances are also close to home. Readers can easily imagine the encounters Mildred had with racists at public facilities, or her partying with friends, or her being involved in church and community work.