Like One of the Family Read online

  Black Women Writers Series

  Series Editor: Deborah McDowell

  Beacon Press

  25 Beacon Street

  Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

  www.beacon.org

  Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

  ©. 1956 by Alice Childress

  Introduction copyright ©. 1986 by Beacon Press

  Published originally by Independence Publishers, Brooklyn, New York

  First published as a Beacon Paperback in 1986 by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved

  First digital-print edition 2001

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Childress, Alice.

  Like one of the family.

  (Black women writers series)

  Originally published: Brooklyn : Independence Publishers, [1956].

  Bibliography: p.

  ISBN 0-8070-0903-2

  eISBN 978-0-8070-9665-9

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS3505.H76L5 1986

  813’.54 86-73367

  MY GRANDMOTHER

  Eliza White

  who loved life

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Trudier Harris

  Selected Bibliography

  Like One of the Family

  Listen for the Music

  On Sayin’ No

  Ridin’ the Bus

  Buyin’ Presents

  If You Want to Get Along with Me

  Got to Go Someplace

  The Pocketbook Game

  New York’s My Home

  All About My Job

  Bubba

  The Health Card

  Your Soul … Another You

  Signs of the Times

  Aren’t You Happy?

  Nasty Compliments

  Old as the Hills

  Mrs. James

  Hands

  All the Things We Are

  I Liked Workin’ at that Place

  Good Reason for a Good Time

  I Go to a Funeral

  Weekend with Pearl

  More Blessed To Give

  Sometimes I Feel So Sorry

  I Go to Church

  I Hate Half-Days Off

  What Does Africa Want?

  I Wish I Was a Poet

  Economy Corner

  In the Laundry Room

  I Could Run a School Too

  I Visit Yesterday

  Story Tellin’ Time

  About Those Colored Movies

  Why Should I Get Upset?

  Inhibitions

  What Is It All About?

  We Need a Union Too

  Pretty Sights and Good Feelin’s

  Dope and Things Like That

  Merry Christmas, Marge!

  On Leavin’ Notes

  The ‘Many Others’ in History

  Interestin’ and Amusin’

  A New Kind of Prayer

  History in the Makin’

  Dance with Me, Henry

  Ain’t You Mad?

  Discontent

  Northerners Can Be So Smug

  Let’s Face It

  If Heaven Is What We Want

  Where Is the Speakin’ Place?

  Missionaries

  So Much for Nothing

  The Benevolent Club

  All About Miss Tubman

  A B C’s of Life and Learning

  Somehow I’d Like to Thank Them

  Men in Your Life

  INTRODUCTION by Trudier Harris

  KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE, is an unlikely place to meet black artists, unless they happen to be invited for special occasions. In December of 1978, Alice Childress and I were there participating in the conference on Black American Literature and Humanism held at the University of Tennessee. In one of the lulls, during which artists and scholars had an occasion to mingle, Childress asked me if I had read any of her work. Although she mentioned the titles of several of her books (even giving me an autographed copy of her novel, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich), I found the title of one—Like One of the Family … conversations from a domestic’s life—especially intriguing. Having known many black women who worked as domestics, including several in my family, I could not wait to read Childress’s depictions of their interactions with their employers.

  When I returned to Williamsburg, Virginia, I searched for the book—long out of print—and for more information about this writer who had written so much but been read so little. Childress’s life reflected a nurturing and support that would later evolve into the striking independence characteristic of her work. The great-granddaughter of a slave who was abandoned by her former master at Emancipation, Childress was born in South Carolina in 1920. She therefore grew up with a sense of life from the underprivileged side of the veil. Raised by her grandmother Eliza, Childress was taken at the age of five to New York, an archetypal journey from the South to the promised land of the North that generations of blacks had taken before her. Grandmother Eliza encouraged Childress to jot down certain ideas because they were worth remembering, thereby offering the support that eventually led her to become a writer. The grandmother instilled a sense of value in Childress—value of herself as a human being and of her thoughts. This priceless estimation of her own worth encouraged Childress to explore the world of literature, to seek out those voices, as Richard Wright had done with H. L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and others in the 1920s, which could enhance her perceptions of the world and her own budding artistry. That she is primarily self-taught, not a high school graduate, is a wonder considering her accomplishments since those exploratory days of the thirties and forties.

  Childress’s upbringing and struggles in New York effectively influenced the kind of writer she would become. She says of herself: “I attempt to write about characters without condescension, without making them into an image which some may deem more useful, inspirational, profitable, or suitable.”1 She has also commented that she concentrates “on portraying have-nots in a have society, those seldom singled out by mass media, except as source material for derogatory humor and/or condescending clinical, social analysis.”2

  Before these ideals could be realized, however, Childress had to serve a long apprenticeship. As her young adult years had already revealed, the dream of better opportunity in the North was elusive. She pursued a variety of jobs, including assistant machinist, photo retoucher, saleslady, and insurance agent as she worked relentlessly to gain audiences for her work as a playwright, actress, and novelist. She also did domestic work for a few months; the day she quit she surprised her employer by throwing her keys at her head. The woman later asked her to return to work. This “only work” that Childress could find turned out to be valuable, for it provided her with firsthand experience of the job situation she would later depict in Like One of the Family. Her first commercial acting success came with the American Negro Theatre, where she originated the role of Blanche in their famous production of Anna Lucasta in 1944. She later played the same part on Broadway with the original cast, which included such stars as Canada Lee and Hilda Simms. For this she was nominated for a Tony award.

  Childress began to be published in 1950 when her short play, Florence, appeared in the journal Masses and Mainstream.3 She first directed the play in 1949 at the American Negro Theatre, where she served as actress, writer, drama coach, and director. But Childress’s first major success came with the Greenwich Mews Theatre 1955 production of Trouble in Mind, a play in which she challenged directly the stereotyped presentations of blacks in the theater. The main character, Wiletta Mayer, an aging black actress, is once again called upon to play a rol
e that she knows is antithetical to the feelings of a black mother for her son. In the play within the play, entitled “Chaos in Belleville,” she is required to give up her son to the white men she is told will protect him when she knows that he will be lynched for the “crime” of voting and urging other blacks to vote. Wiletta tries to lead the cast in a walkout of the racist production. However, paltry bids for stardom win out over principle, and the cast opts to pursue a project they do not believe in and from which they know the white director will release Wiletta for challenging his authority. The price of black human dignity is too dear for them to pay, so they smile at racial insults and try to retain some vague notion of what they believe is their professionalism. But at the end Wiletta still envisions the kind of work she wants to perform.

  The extent to which the play challenged prevailing images of black character is attested to in Childress’s alternate endings. The more militant option, demanded by the producers to show togetherness and black and white unity, had the cast leave the theater behind a marching Wiletta. Only when the racist director agrees to call in the author for the requested changes do Wiletta and the cast agree to continue work. Childress disagreed with this version because it let the director off the hook, gave him the right to “do it for them.” Childress considered it wishful thinking that the races would agree to change. The original two-act version, published in Lindsay Patterson’s Black Theater (1971), ends after Wiletta’s criticisms and with the certainty that, on the morrow, she will no longer be a part of the cast.

  The black woman in Trouble in Mind who would not be quiet when silence negated her humanity anticipates, in her almost apologetic outspokenness, the militant Mildred of Like One of the Family. After reading the book, I was converted to an abiding faith in the voice of Alice Childress that was strong enough to inspire my first book-length project—on domestic workers in Afro-American literature.4 Although I eventually treated several other writers in the study, Childress and Mildred were my motivation and inspiration. A part of that study included interviews with women who had worked as domestics, and Mildred was the source of the anecdotes I used in trying to get them to talk with me about their work. Mildred’s description of being tested for honesty, especially in a conversation like “The Pocketbook Game,” was one of the tangible, ongoing ties she had to many of these domestic workers. Even in 1980 and in 1981, black women were still being tested for their honesty in white women’s houses, and they were still being cheated out of their rightful wages.5

  Childress’s voice in Like One of the Family was different from most I had heard. She dared to test assumptions about the expected in Afro-American literature. Instead of a handkerchief-headed black woman, or one bowing and scraping before her “quality white folks,” Mildred stood up straight and tall. Childress’s dramatization of Mildred and of her other characters was lifelike and the issues concerning them immediate. In this collection of crisp conversations of two to three pages each, I shared the adventures of a black maid, a day worker who told her friend Marge about her experiences with the white folks in the New York area. The conversations were structured as dramatic monologues so that although I never heard Marge’s voice, I felt her presence and intuited her thoughts through my own reactions to the stories Mildred told. When Mildred said she had snatched a newspaper out of her white employer’s hand at breakfast one morning, I wanted to say, as Marge implies: “Aw come on, girl, naw you didn’t!” And, like Marge, I wanted to pat Mildred on the back for being so daring. When Mildred stands toe-to-toe with the preacher and tells him, in terms comparable to Langston Hughes’s Madam Alberta K. Johnson in “Madam and the Minister,” exactly why she hadn’t been coming to church, I wanted to join Marge in her symbolic outcry: “Move, girl, them lightning bolts you stirred up might zap me.” And when Mildred plans parties for the children in her apartment building and gives them lessons in black history, I wanted to applaud an author who could create a sassy character but who could also transcend stereotypes in that creation.

  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.