Coming of Age in Mississippi (24 page)

“What are you so
nervous
about? Are you scared Jimmy’s gonna find out you’re comin’ to work two hours late every day?” Lily White asked.

“Just don’t make it your business to tell him,” Lola hissed back.

“Will you two girls cut that out and respect Mama’s granddaughter,” Big Howard said, smirking, as he saw how attentive I was to their conversation.

I had forgotten Winnie until she showed her face in the doorway. She had changed clothes and was now ready to leave.

“Mama, you go home and rest now,” Lily White said, patting Winnie on the shoulder. “You look pretty tired.”

“Shucks, it’s after seven! I think I’ll set down and rest a bit. You’ll be off soon, Essie Mae, and then we kin catch the bus together,” Winnie said to me.

“Aw, Mama, Lola ain’t gonna hurt your granddaughter,” Lily White said, throwing his hands up to his mouth as he swished away laughing.

I could tell Winnie was angry. She didn’t say anything. She turned and went into the pantry leaving me and Lola at the dishwasher alone.

Lola now acted as if he was angry with me. He forced me out of the way and started raking the dirty dishes and stacking them. I didn’t say a word. I just stepped to the other side of the machine and took the clean dishes out, stacking them on the shelf. We hardly spoke until I left.

I couldn’t wait until I got outside to ask Winnie about Lola and Lily White and the others. But I didn’t have to ask. Winnie started talking, telling me everything I wanted to know and more.

“Essie Mae, don’t you let them things in that restaurant upset you. You jus’ do your work and pay no mind to them and they won’t bother you. That place ain’t fit for young people like you to be workin’ in. I is old and done seen or heard jus’ about everything. And they don’t bother me ’cause um old. But can’t no young single woman work there. If they don’t end up bein’ whores for them no-good married men and Steve fire them, Lola them scare them off. I sho’ hope Ivory Lee send fo’ you ’cause you can’t find no jobs fit to work at in New Orleans. You might find somethin’ to do in Kansas City,” she said, sighing as if she was tired.

We walked to the bus stop in silence. As we stood waiting for the bus, Winnie took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. I thought she was crying, but it was so dark I couldn’t tell for sure. When we got on the bus, I saw tears running down her face.

I sat beside her remembering the day I went to her house and saw her two white sons, Sam and Walter. I knew that out of her thirteen children they were the only two she kept. My Mama was the only one who married out of Winnie’s house, because she was the oldest. As the others got older, Winnie gave them away one by one to the Negro families who didn’t have many children and were farmers on Mr. Carter’s plantation. Winnie never had a husband of her own so she didn’t farm. She spent twenty-some years working as Mr. Carter’s cook and she got Sam and Walter by one of the white hired hands.

She loved Sam and Walter more than any of the others. Everything she had she put on them. She looked to them as her salvation. She wanted them to finish school and be big successes. But they had both quit high school the year before and come to New Orleans to get jobs and Winnie had come right behind them.

Looking at her out of the corner of my eye, I could see her whole life of hardship on her face. The ends of her frizzled graying hair showed from under her scarf. Her skin sagged off
her high Indian cheekbones which had become more prominent with the years. Her deep sad eyes were filled with tears.

I got the feeling we were thinking about the same things—her twenty-some years on Mr. Carter’s plantation, thirteen children and no husband, and always the hope for something better. But now she’d ended up in Maple Hill Restaurant washing dishes, sharing the kitchen with two cursing cooks and a bunch of strange men who thought they were women.

One day during my second week at Maple Hill, Steve, the owner, came into the kitchen with a uniform and an apron in his hands. He told me he wanted me to work in the dining room for the day. I changed into the uniform, thinking, “At last, I’m a waitress,” and went out to report to Waite, the headwaiter.

“Mmm, but you look nice in that uniform,” he said, smiling. “You ever bus dishes before?”

“Bus dishes? Is that what I’m gonna do?” I asked, disappointed.

“Oh, ain’t nothin’ to it. C’mon, I’ll show you.” He walked to a table where a couple had just finished eating. “Watch me,” he said as he began to remove the dirty dishes. The couple looked up and Waite said to them, “Oh, just breakin’ in a new bus girl.” The couple smiled but their eyes said, “You must be pretty stupid if you don’t know how to bus dishes.” All of a sudden I felt that I wasn’t cut out to be a bus girl because if all the white folks who ate in the restaurant gave me looks like that I would probably break all the dishes.

There were three waiters working the dining room, Waite, P.J., and Lily White, and they each had a customer as I started bussing the tables. I removed the dirty dishes from each table, placed them on a tray, and took the tray into the kitchen. A new couple came in and Waite said I was to serve them water. He went to the pantry and showed me where the ice and glasses were. When I returned with the two glasses of
water, I was shocked to see that just about every table in the dining room was full. I began to panic. I stood there in front of the swinging doors with the water in my hands as Waite them ran past me ordering salads from the pantry. I was still standing there holding the water when they came back out.

“C’mon, Annie, serve that water and get water for the other tables,” Waite said as he went by.

I put the two glasses down in front of the first two people I saw. Then I ran back to the pantry, took a small tray, and quickly filled ten more glasses with water. Just as I started through the swinging doors, sideways, with the water tray held in front of me, P.J. came through the other door and raked off all ten glasses. They hit the floor with a tremendous crash, sending ice, broken glass and water in all directions. As I stood in the door, still holding the empty tray, all the customers turned to see what was going on.

“Don’t you come through that door sideways durin’ a rush hour! Kick that door with your foot if your hands are full!” Waite snapped as he passed me. “Some mess you made here!” he said. I rushed in behind him and began to pick up the broken glass with my hands.

“Leave that stuff there and let Willie clean it up! Don’t you know better than to pick up glass with your hands? Get some water to the customers out there.”

I quickly refilled the tray and entered the dining room again, this time making sure that no one was coming through from the other side. It seemed as though everyone in the dining room was looking at me when I came through the door. I stood there for a moment, composing myself. Then I started distributing the water like nothing had happened. I managed to serve them all water without any more trouble. While they were eating I stood up front with the waiters and had a chance to look over the customers. I saw that they were mostly students. Schoolbooks were piled on the floor next to many of the tables. A few of the students were even doing their work while they ate.

“They must be puttin’ it on ’em pretty heavy over there at Tulane, eh?” P.J. said to me as he noticed me watching a guy do his homework. This was the first time he had said anything to me without being fresh. I figured he felt bad about knocking those glasses out of my hands. “I can see you studyin’ like that when you get to college,” he said, trying to draw me into conversation. “Yeah, I wish I was one of them students sittin’ out there. Most of ’em that come in here is from up North. Got them rich-assed parents up there in New Yo’k and dif ’rent places, sendin’ ’em a whole lotta money and all they do is lay around on their ass and mess with these fast girls.…”

“Shut up, P.J.,” Waite whispered loudly. “Go back there to your own station and talk that shit if you want to. Don’t you be messin’ up my tips.”

A long line of students waited near the entrance, so as soon as a table was empty I quickly bussed it. I noticed that most of the students had left tips of more than twenty-five cents each. “Boy, if I was a waitress, I could make some money,” I thought.

“Hey, sonny, wait, you forgot your change,” P.J. called after a white boy who had just left a table. The white boy acted as if he didn’t even hear P.J. and went on to pay his check.

“See that fuckin’ cracker? He from Mississippi,” P.J. grumbled as he picked up ten pennies from the table. “Annie, I swear, you can have yo’ Mississippi rednecks. We got a bunch of telephone men that come in here, all from Mississippi. They’ll eat a big steak ’cause the telephone company have to pay for the food. Then them cheap-assed fuckers’ll get up and leave a nickel tip. Shit!” he spat, as he helped me clean the dishes from the table.

That night I went home with my back killing me from toting those heavy trays full of dishes. I looked forward with pleasure to going back to the kitchen the next day. Even more satisfying was the thought that I would be leaving the restaurant the following week. However, when I got to the restaurant
the next morning I learned that the busboy had quit. I was asked to bus dishes until they found someone for the job. A week passed and they still hadn’t found a replacement. By this time I had gotten used to bussing dishes and I was beginning to like the job—especially the fifteen-dollar difference in salary. Whenever I was in the dining room, I felt like I was somebody, that I was human, because I had to react to living people. But when I was in the kitchen using the dishwasher I felt just like a machine. Besides that, I liked being around the students. Watching them made me look forward to college, living away from home and having the freedom they had.

After my second week of work in the dining room, P.J. quit. At first Waite and Lily White worked the dining room alone. Then one day the dining room got packed. Steve threw a checkbook at me and told me to take orders. He was so pleased with how I handled myself that from that day on I was a waitress, earning more money than I had ever made.

Before the summer was over, I had worked all over the restaurant. I learned to do everything from cooking to making salads. Even more important, I learned a lot about the people I was working with, especially Lily White and Lola.

I got to know Lily White first. He told me his real name was James and soon he let me call him James outside of the dining room. We had many conversations during our breaks. He talked mostly about his nightlife and about his career as an “exotic” dancer. Lily White was his stage name. He’d tell me how pretty and smooth his body was and how when he went on stage he used a light powder so that when he stripped under the spotlights he looked snow white. He bragged so much about how good a dancer he was and how the men all raved that I agreed to go to one of his performances.

The new busboy, Robert, a freshman at Dillard, was also from Mississippi and didn’t know very much about James and Lola types. He told me he knew where James danced and would take me if I wanted to go. I got the feeling that he was
more curious about James than I was, but he was afraid to go alone because he knew James might think he liked him.

Finally one Saturday night we decided to see Lily White’s midnight show.

We were ten minutes late, and as we entered, James was just being introduced by a tall handsome well-dressed Negro. A small combo came out and started playing some strip-tease music. As Robert and I made our way through the customers, I noticed that most of them were homos. There were hardly any women, and the ones who were there looked to me like they might have been men in women’s clothes.

“Ladies and gentlemen, again tonight we present the fabulous Miss Lily White,” the tall program announcer said just as Robert and I found an empty table.

I looked to the stage and I was shocked. James didn’t look like James. His pot belly had completely disappeared. If I hadn’t known him I would have sworn he was a woman with that wig and costume he wore. When he came on, all the people in the place began to whistle and call “Lily White,” and make all kinds of cracks. “C’mon, Lily, show us what you got,” someone shouted.

“Old Lily got plenty,” someone else answered, and everybody laughed.

James wiggled on the stage as if he was out to please them all. He really seemed to enjoy the shouting crowd down below. I was still standing, gaping at him, as he went into his stripping act. I was dying to see if his body was as white as he said it was.

“C’mon, Mama, set yo’ pretty ass down! It ain’t transparent, y’know,” a girlish voice cried indignantly behind me. I turned to see who she was talking to and noticed I was the only one standing, so I bopped down real quick in a chair next to Robert. I realized from the way she said it, she probably thought I was one of them.

“Shit, everybody in here must be queer,” Robert whispered as I sat next to him.

The combo drummer began a roll on his drum and all the lights gradually faded out except the big spotlight on James. My eyes were sitting on the end of my nose as I watched James remove his costume piece by piece. Each piece he removed caused a wave of loud sighs, whistles, and cries from the audience. I looked at James’s rigged-up tits and couldn’t tell them from real ones. He removed everything but his G-string and turned around. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me as his snow-white ass glittered in the spotlight. The whole place reeled and rocked as he went into his “snake-dance wiggle.” Robert and I were speechless at the end of the performance.

The next day at work the whole place knew that we had gone to see James. I had expected them to tease us and carry on all day, but they did nothing more than comment. I got the feeling that most of them wanted to go see James themselves but hadn’t had the nerve to do so. Anyway a lot of them got around to seeing him after we went. James seemed really pleased that we had seen him. I waited for him to crack on me when I told him that he was good, but he just smiled. He and I became friends after that, and he told me a lot about Lola.

Lola had a record and was known to be dangerous, so didn’t anyone in the restaurant bother him much. When he came to work at Maple Hill, he was just out of “Tulane and Broad” (Louisiana State Prison), where he had spent three years in jail for armed robbery and assault. He smuggled a razor into prison, lodged in the roof of his mouth. While he was serving his time, a big fight broke out between the homos and the straight men in the prison. Lola cut up three or four men in the cell and earned the name Killer.