Like One of the Family Read online

  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.

  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 c
omplacency 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.