Like One of the Family (4 page)

By selecting her character from the lower echelons of black society, Childress exemplified her determination to respect and present without condescension those folks who are just folks—living, loving, working, being. Childress thus anticipates the portrayal of similar characters in works by writers in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Gloria Naylor's Mattie Michael and Ciel Turner in
The Women of Brewster Place
(1982). The lack of embellishment in characterization also anticipates Alice Walker's portrayal of Mem and Margaret Copeland in
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
(1970), and Hannah Kemhuff and Rannie Toomer in
In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women
(1973); these women are what they are—commoners, farmers, church workers, women who engage our attention without being painted as some superhuman examples in the form of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's
Iola Leroy
(1892) or Charles Chesnutt's Rena Walden in
The House Behind the Cedars
(1900).

Childress, then, though frequently unread and more frequently out of print, captured in
Like One of the Family
a vein so true to Afro-American life and culture that many post-1950s creations of black women must find their genesis in her depiction of Mildred. Not a wandering, passive Janie, or a predetermined, disillusioned Lutie Johnson, Mildred is a black woman who knows that black women, even when they have been domestic servants, have had dignity and a degree of self-determination to sustain and define themselves against frightful odds.

In this sense, Childress and Mildred represent a continuity in Afro-American literature and history that was unlike any other. What they shared touched the heart of the development of Afro-American communities in this country. During slavery, black women had worked in the big houses as servants or in the fields beside black men. During Reconstruction, when the forty acres and a mule were not forthcoming, black women could still use their skills as domestics to find jobs and try to hold their families together. Some still worked in the fields, but the majority of them were domestic servants. Forced to adopt individual strategies for interacting with their white employers, and isolated from other workers, these women sometimes found themselves in a new form of slavery. If they were worked and not paid, there was no union to which they could complain. If they were accused of stealing, their claims of Christian virtue would not alleviate the charges. If they were fired without notice, they simply had to look for other employment.

Childress and Mildred showed the problems peculiar to domestic workers, and they illustrated the center from which many attendant problems in black communities had grown for the domestic herself as well as in terms of the popular conceptions of her. The integral place of the domestic in black American experience suggests that the black woman as maid is the basic historical conception from which other images and stereotypes have grown. Dependency on service pans foreshadows the dependency of welfare, for certainly that paternalistic phenomenon influenced social expectations. Sexual exploitation of the maid by the employer's husband, which is a direct extension of slavery, may have contributed its share to the stereotyped images of the black woman as hot momma or unwed mother. And the parallels continue; the relationship between mistress and maid explains, in part, other images of black women in the popular imagination as well as in the literature.

After reading
Like One of the Family
, I began to wonder why I had not heard more of Alice Childress. The reason is that like Mildred and Childress's real-life Aunt Lorraine upon whom Mildred's character is based, Childress is a writer who “refused to exchange dignity for pay.” Such refusal can be costly; the cost for Childress was that her Mildred stories were printed more frequently and more widely read in other countries than in the United States. It also implied that her refusal to blunt her barbed attacks made her nationalistic views unpopular in the assimilationist climate of the 1950s. Her outspoken Mildred had little of the God-fearing, long-suffering tolerance that would characterize Lorraine Hansberry's Mama Lena Younger a few years later in
A Raisin in the Sun
.

Childress's claim to artistic freedom paralleled Mildred's claim to physical and psychological freedom in her violations of space requirements in the homes of the whites for whom she worked. Childress's refusal to adhere to the expected portrayals of downtrodden, suffering, victimized black women in literature was just as effective as Mildred sitting in the living rooms of her employers and violating their notions of what domestics ought to do and be. Both gained a freedom and a greater sense of self by not allowing outside forces to define them.

In Mildred, Childress seldom romanticizes the domestic worker, but she does suggest that that position was not ultimately so negating that it does not warrant celebration in the literature.
Like One of the Family
celebrates the image of black women most common to their history and suggests that they are no less dignified for having spent time on their knees. Mildred scrubs and soars. In both postures lies the complexity of black women.

^1.
Alice Childress, “Knowing the Human Condition,” in
Black
American Literature and Humanism
, ed. R. Baxter Miller (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1981), p. 10.

^2.
Alice Childress, “A Candle in a Gale Wind,” in
Black
Women Writers (
1950–1980): A Critical
Evaluation
, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1984), p. 112.

^3.
“Florence,” in
Masses and Mainstream
3 (October 1950): 34–47.

^4.
Trudier Harris,
From
Mammies to Militants; Domestics in Black American Literature
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982).

^5.
According to Childress, many black militant domestics, led by Mrs. Nina Evans, a domestic worker, often met in a rented studio room on 110th Street in Harlem. They were trying to form, a domestic workers' union.

^6.
Kathryn Morgan,
Children of Strangers: The Stories of a Black Family
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 15.

^7.
Information in this paragraph and in sections of the comments on specific conversations in the following paragraphs is taken from
From
Mammies to Militants
.

^8.
Childress reports that “The Health Card,” “The Pocketbook Game,” and “Mrs. James” all happened to her as a day worker.

^9.
Autherine Lucy, a black woman, attempted to integrate the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa in 1956, several years before the University was actually integrated in the early 1960s.

^10.
Letter from Alice Childress to Trudier Harris, dated January 7, 1980. Remaining quotations by Childress are from this source.

^11.
Helen Davis, review of
Like
One of the Family
, in
Masses and Mainstream
9 (July 1956): 50–51.

BOOKS
Like
One
of
the Family
…
Conversations from
a Domestic's Life
(Brooklyn, N.Y.: Independence Publishers, 1956)

Wine
in the Wilderness: A Comedy-Drama
(New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1969)

Mojo
and String: Two Plays
(New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1971)

A Hero Ain't
Nothin'
but a Sandwich
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973)

Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White
(New York: French, 1973)

When the Rattlesnake Sounds
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1975)

Let's Hear It for the Queen
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1976)

A Short Walk
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979)

Rainbow Jordan
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981)

PLAY PRODUCTIONS

Florence
, New York, American Negro Theatre, 1949

Just a Little Simple
, adapted from Langston Hughes's collection
Simple

Speaks His Mind
, New York, Club Baron Theatre, September 1950
Gold Through the Trees
, New York, Club Baron Theatre, 1952

Trouble in
Mind
, New York, Greenwich Mews Theatre, 4 November 1955

Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White
, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, December 1966

String
, adapted from Guy de Maupassant's story “A Piece of String,” New York, St. Marks Playhouse, 25 March 1969

The
Freedom Drum
, retitled
Young Martin Luther King
, Performing Arts Repertory Theatre, on tour 1969–1972

Mojo:
A Black Love Story
, New York, New Heritage Theatre, November 1070

Sea
Island Song
, Charleston, South Carolina, Stage South, 1977

Gullah
, Amherst, University of Massachusetts, 1984

SCREENPLAY

A Hero Ain't
Nothin'
but a Sandwich
, adapted from Childress's novel of the same title, New World Pictures, 1977

TELEVISION

Wine
in the Wilderness
, in “On Being Black,” Boston, WGBH, 4 March 1969

Wedding Band
, ABC, 1973

String
, for
Vision
(series), PBS, 1979

OTHER

The World on a Hill
, in
Plays to Remember
, Literary Heritage Series (New York: Macmillan, 1968)

Black Scenes
, edited by Childress (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971)—includes a scene from Childress's
The African Garden
, pp. 137–45

Trouble in
Mind
, in
Black Theatre
, edited by Lindsay Patterson (New York: New American Library, 1971), pp. 135–74

“Knowing the Human Condition,” in
Black American Literature and Humanism
, edited by R. Baxter Miller (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1981), pp. 8–10

PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS:DRAMA

Florence, A One Act Drama
, in
Masses
and Mainstream
3 (October1950): 34–47

NONFICTION

“For a Negro Theatre,”
Masses
and Mainstream
4 (February 1951): 61–64

“The Negro Woman in American Literature,”
Freedomways
6
(Winter 1966): 14–19, reprinted as “A Woman Playwright Speaks Her Mind,” in
Anthology
of
the Afro-American in the Theatre: A Critical Approach
, edited by Lindsay Patterson (Cornwells Heights, Pa.: Publishers Agency, 1978), pp. 75–79

“ ‘Why Talk About That?,' ”
Negro Digest
16 (April 1967): 17–21

“Black Writers' Views on Literary Lions and Values,”
Negro Digest
17 (January 1968): 36, 85–87

“ ‘But I Do My Thing,' ” in “Can Black and White Artists Still Work Together?,”
New York Times
, 2 February 1969, II: 1, 9

“The Soul Man,”
Essence
(May 1971): 68–69, 94

“Tributes—to Paul Robeson,”
Freedomways
11 (First Quarter 1971):14–15

Abramson, Doris E.
Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925–1959
. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969, pp. 188–204, 258–59.

Brown, Janet.
Feminist Drama: Definitions and Critical Analysis
. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1979, pp. 56–70.

Curb, Rosemary. “An Unfashionable Tragedy of American Racism: Alice Childress'
Wedding Band.” MELUS
7 (Winter 1980): 57–68.

Evans, Mari.
Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation
. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor, 1984, pp. 111–34.

Harris, Trudier.
From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature
. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.

____. “ ‘I wish I was a poet': The Character as Artist in Alice Childress's

Like One
of
the Family,” Black American Literature
Forum
, 14 (Spring 1980): 24–30.

Miller, Jeanne-Marie A. “Images of Black Women in Plays by Black Playwrights.”
College Language Association Journal
20 (June 1977): 494–507.

Mitchell, Loften.
Black Drama: The Story of the American
Negro
in the Theatre
. New York; Hawthorn Books, 1977.

___. “Three Writers and a Dream,”
Crisis 72
(April 1965): 219–23.

H
I
M
ARGE
! I have had me one hectic day…. Well, I had to take out my crystal ball and give Mrs. C … a thorough reading. She's the woman that I took over from Naomi after Naomi got married…. Well, she's a pretty nice woman as they go and I have never had too much trouble with her, but from time to time she really gripes me with her ways.

When she has company, for example, she'll holler out to me from the living room to the kitchen: “Mildred dear! Be sure and eat
both
of those lamb chops for your lunch!” Now you know she wasn't doing a thing but tryin' to prove to the company how “good” and “kind” she was to the servant, because she had told me
already
to eat those chops.

Today she had a girl friend of hers over to lunch and I was real busy afterwards clearing the things away and she called me over and introduced me to the woman…. Oh no, Marge! I didn't object to that at all. I greeted the lady and then went back to my work…. And then it started! I could hear her talkin' just as loud … and she says to her friend, “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!” And on and on she went … and every time I came in to move a plate off the table both of them would grin at me like chessy cats.