Coming of Age in Mississippi (22 page)

By the time school ended, I realized that despite Mrs. Burke, it had been a good year. I had finished tenth grade with straight A’s and was outshooting all the other girls on the basketball team. At Centreville Baptist, I sang in the choir, was the regular substitute pianist for Sunday school, and did all the things I had dreamed of doing since the first time I had attended there.

I still wanted to leave home for the summer, but I was not up tight with anxiety the way I had been the year before. This time Mama could see the happiness in me and she didn’t mind letting me go. She knew I would be back in the fall.

I wrote to Ed and Bertha but it turned out they had no room for me this summer. Ed suggested I write to my Aunt Celia (Mama’s sister) who was in New Orleans. I did and received a letter a few days later saying I was welcome to come, if I didn’t mind sharing a bed with her sister, Sis. I wrote Celia that I would sleep on the floor if she didn’t have a bed for me. I took the bus that evening and arrived two days before my letter.

I went to New Orleans with the intention of getting a job as a waitress in a big-time restaurant. I had been told that a waitress could make as much as fifty dollars a week, and I hoped to save three hundred dollars that summer and add it to the two hundred that was already in my bank account. What I didn’t know at the time was that most of the big-time restaurants used only waiters who were very skilled and who had chosen the job as a career. I spent two weeks looking for a bigtime waitress job, but when I couldn’t find one, I tried for bus girl. Bus girls and busboys made from twenty-five to thirty-five dollars a week plus tips.

Before I realized it, I had wasted a whole month looking for a restaurant job. Sis was working as a domestic, doing work for five dollars a day. She earned twenty-five to thirty dollars a week and had saved about seventy-five dollars during the month of June. It was now July and I had yet to earn my first penny. Sis tried very hard to get me to take on a job as a domestic, but I wouldn’t. I hadn’t come to New Orleans to do housework. I’d go back home and work for Mrs. Hunt first.

My Grandmother Winnie, who had recently come to New
Orleans, also lived with Celia, and worked as a dishwasher in Maple Hill, a little restaurant on Maple Street. They used only waiters, too. But occasionally they hired bus girls and needed an additional dishwasher. She had spoken to the owner about me, and I spent the first week in July sitting around praying and waiting for someone to quit at Maple Hill. But didn’t anyone quit and that weekend I packed my things to go back home.

Sunday, the day before I was to leave, Sis and I were sitting out on the back steps, both of us feeling sad. All that past month we had had fun together. Sis had treated me to a movie almost every weekend on the promise that I would treat her as soon as I was working. Now I felt very guilty. I found myself wanting to stay if only to take her to a movie and repay her for being so nice to me.

We had been sitting in gloom and silence for about an hour when a car drove up and stopped in front of the back gate. Two boys got out. One of them waved to us and I recognized him as Little Eddie, one of Sis’s classmates who had quit Willis High two years ago.

“Well, if it ain’t Eddie!” Sis cried, as Eddie and his friend walked through the gate.

“Jones’s mama told me you here with Celia and Johnny,” Eddie said. “What in the world you doin’ in New Orleans?”

“Just here for the summer. Where is you working anyway?” Sis asked.

“That’s what I come by here for,” Eddie said, “to see if you had a job. I’m over at the chicken factory. I been working out there for about a year. They need a lot of workers now.”

“What happen out there? Did everybody quit?” Sis asked him.

“Yes, last week a whole lot of people walked off the job. They was crazy to quit a job like that. Women out there make forty or fifty dollars a week. And we make from sixty-five to eighty dollars. At home I used to work from sunup to sundown to make fifteen dollars a week mowin’ them white folks’
yard. Now I’m makin’ sometime seventy-five and eighty dollars a week. They’re crazy if they think um gonna quit my job,” he said.

“Forty or fifty dollars a week!” I said, almost shouting.

“You workin’, Essie Mae?” he asked innocently.

“No, and I was going back home tomorrow, too. Do you think they’ll hire me out there?” I pleaded.

“Sho’. They need people some bad and y’all could start work tomorrow if you wanted to.”

“I got a job making twenty-five dollars a week doing housework now, but I’d sho’ quit if I thought I could get fifty dollars,” Sis said.

“Y’ all want to go tomorrow then?” Eddie asked.

“I know what I’ll do. I’ll call the lady I work for and tell her I’m sick and me and Essie Mae kin go to the chicken factory tomorrow. You want to go, Essie Mae?” she asked me.

“Sho’ if you go,” I answered.

“We’ll pick y’all up in the morning,” Eddie said. “What time will you be by here, Buck?” he asked his friend.

“ ’Bout six o’clock. You see, we have to git out there early ’fore the people start walkin’. We gotta be already inside the factory workin’,” Buck said. “Can you all be ready for six?”

“Sho’,” said Sis. “All right, Essie Mae?” She looked at me and I nodded my head yes.

As they headed back to their car, I sat there with my eyes closed and my head back. I was thanking God because I knew this was the answer to the prayer I had prayed for a week. I thought of what Mama always used to say, “He may not come when you want him, but he is always right on time.”

The next morning Sis and I got up, dressed and sat on the front steps. We waited out there for Buck from about 5:45 until 6:30, then we went back inside the house. We didn’t say a word to each other. Sis sat on the side of the bed and looked miserable as I picked up my suitcase and started to pack
again. I was half finished when we heard a horn blowing outside. Sis ran to the window, but I didn’t stop packing. People were always blowing their horns in front of the house.

“It’s him!” Sis shouted.

I left my open suitcase on the bed, picked up my purse, and followed Sis outside. Buck was sitting behind the wheel of what looked like a delivery truck, smiling at us as we walked toward him. Sis opened the door and we started to climb in beside him.

“Wait,” he said. “Y’all gotta git in the back.” He got out and took us around to the back of the truck. He knocked on the door twice and someone opened it.

When we peered inside, it was like looking from day into night. It was almost pitch black and hot as hell in there because the truck didn’t have any windows. We saw about a dozen people packed in already.

Sis suddenly recognized another old classmate. “Rosemary! What you all doing in here?”

“Shit!” cried Rosemary. “Where you and Essie Mae goin’?”

“Y’all get in,” said Buck. “I’m late already and I gotta pick up some more people.” As soon as we jumped up, he closed the door and locked it.

“Shit,” said Rosemary, as we scrambled for seats. “It looks like all the niggers in Mississippi is workin’ out there at that chicken factory.”

“I know one thing,” one girl said, “I’m so scared. Them people walkin’ out in front looked mighty mad with us last time. They been breakin’ car glasses and beatin’ up people.”

After that, everyone got very quiet. Sis and I just looked at each other. I began to get a funny scary feeling. Somehow I felt that we were doing something wrong. I thought of myself as a criminal and I didn’t even know why.

Buck made two more stops before we got to the factory, and then at last he opened the door and said, “We here.” We all scrambled out and found that we were right inside the factory itself, in some sort of loading area. I thought that was
kind of funny. I had wanted to see the outside of the building because I had never seen a big factory before. Now I felt even more like a criminal.

Sis and I joined the others on a long line. I was surprised that all the people on the line were Negroes. I had always pictured a big factory as a place where Negroes and whites worked side by side—at least that was what the pictures of factories in magazines showed. Until I got to the head of the line, I didn’t see any whites at all. But then there were two white men sitting inside a door at a makeshift desk. They asked us our names and addresses, and wrote them down. When we got past that desk, we were inside the factory. It was very noisy. I looked up and there were hundreds of naked dead chickens hanging from the ceiling. They were moving very slowly along an assembly line of about fifty workers. The workers looked so tired, I began to feel sorry for them. Some of them looked as dead as the chickens hanging before them.

While we were standing there, a big husky white man, whom I later discovered was the foreman, came up to us. “Y’all git over there at them troughs and find a spot,” he said. Then several young Negro guys were called over to help us. They stood at our sides telling us what to do until we had caught on. Then they moved on to other new workers as they came in and were given positions.

Earlier I had felt sorry for the people who were working when we came in. Now after about two hours of work, they not only felt sorry for us but were openly laughing at us. The chickens had been moving very slow in the beginning. Now the rate of speed was doubled. I stood there with sweat running down my face and legs. It was so hot, I felt as though I would faint. The chickens were now moving as fast as I could blink my eyes. I was on the end of the trough which pulled the insides out. There were five of us at this spot. I stood there reaching up and snatching out those boiling hot guts with my bare hands as fast as I could. But I just wasn’t fast enough. The faster the chickens moved, the sicker I got. My
face, arms, and clothes were splattered with blood and chicken shit. I got so disgusted at one point that I stood there and let about a dozen chickens half full of shit pass me by. So many chickens left the trough half clean that the foreman moved the five of us and put some of the older hands there. Before the ten o’clock break, I had been moved about five times.

As soon as the assembly line stopped for the fifteen-minute break, I headed outside. I was with a group of new workers. We all ran out suffocating as though we were running from death.

“Hey! Where y’all going? Y’all can’t go outside!” some big black guy said. He stood just outside the entrance we had used to enter the factory.

We stopped dead in our tracks. A few feet outside the factory a long line of men and women walking up and down the sidewalk with signs on their backs began to yell at us.

“Scabs! Strikebreakers! Hicks! Country niggers! Go back to Mississippi!”

I had never seen such an angry bunch of Negroes in all my life. We stood there with our eyes popping out of our heads as we slowly backed into the factory. As I turned around, I noticed that the older hands hadn’t even attempted to go outside. They were now sitting around on the floor, on crates and on stools. I just backed against the wall and sat down. Sis came over and joined me. We didn’t exchange a single word. We just sat there looking out at the people walking up and down the sidewalk. Some of the signs read: NO MORE SLAVE LABOR. WE WANT MORE PAY. And some simply said SCABS.

During the lunch hour, we still weren’t allowed outside of the factory. About five of the big Negro helpers were sent out to get sandwiches for us. By the time we had all gotten something to eat, the lunch hour was over. We worked until eight o’clock that night. We cleaned about three to four thousand chickens. And still two trailers full were left undone.

When Buck stopped in front of Celia’s to let Sis and me
out, we both stumbled out of the truck half blinded with fatigue. I felt like crawling up the porch steps on my fours.

“My goodness, look at how dirty and stinky y’all is,” Celia said. “Don’t sit down in that chair, Sis, pull off them filthy clothes.”

I was too tired to speak. I walked straight through the house to the bathroom. I was in a tub of warm water up to my neck when Sis walked in.

“Celia say Johnny is some mad with us,” she said.

“ ’Bout what?” I asked.

“Breaking the strike at the chicken factory,” she answered.

“I won’t be breaking it tomorrow,” I said.

“What you mean?” she asked.

“ ’Cause I ain’t going back out there. That work is too hard. Every bone in my body is aching,” I said.

“Buck said it won’t be that hard after we get caught up on the chickens and get used to it,” Sis said, standing there looking at me somewhat puzzled. “Do you know we made $9.60 today?”

“That ain’t worth it,” I said.

When Sis left the room, I leaned back in the tub and closed my eyes. I was about to fall asleep when I heard Johnny yelling at her.

“Yeah, but why did you and Essie Mae have to go out there? Them people didn’t quit their jobs ’cause they just got tired of them. They quit them ’cause they is out there makin’ chicken feed. Those are slavey jobs,” he said. “Don’t you and Essie Mae go back out there tomorrow, you hear. I just finished with a strike out there on the river front and Celia them was starvin’ until I started back to work. Now heah my own sister is taking bread outta some starvin’ baby’s mouth. Where is Essie Mae?” he asked Sis.

“She’s taking a bath,” Sis answered.

Johnny came and knocked on the bathroom door. “Essie Mae, look, don’t you and Sis go back out there to that chicken factory tomorrow. You hear me!” he shouted.

“I heard you,” I yelled back to him.

Later that night after I had slept for about two hours I sat up in bed and thought about the $9.60 we had made. I told myself over and over again that it wasn’t worth it. And besides, Johnny had made me feel guilty. Tomorrow I would take the bus to Centreville, I decided. But at five-thirty the next morning Sis was tapping me on the shoulder. She didn’t say a word. I guess I had known all along that I would be going to that damn factory. You just didn’t make $9.60 anywhere.

Sis and I were in the bathroom getting dressed when Celia knocked on the door. “Essie Mae, what you’n Sis doin’? Y’all ain’t goin’ out to that chicken factory. You’n Sis know what Johnny said last night.”