I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots

by Susan Straight

  He used his schoolteacher voice. “Mr. Powell, this is Marietta Cook, who I’ve told you is perfect to replace Lee. She’s stable, reliable, and extremely trustworthy.”

  Mr. Powell had reddish cheeks—that was all she saw, as she was afraid to look directly at his face. She didn’t want to see Mr. Ray’s kind of face. But Mr. Powell was already putting on his heavy coat after he glanced at her. “She’s your responsibility anyway, Larkin,” he said. “Bring her in Friday during the day to sign the papers. And tell her to do a good job in the bar—Lee was sloppy.” He stopped to talk to the desk clerk for a minute, and then he went out the huge front door, letting in a gust of cold air.

  Baby Poppa raised his eyebrows at her. “I told you the place was mine at night,” he said. “You’re not supposed to start till Friday. I’ll show you tonight what you’ll have to do, and we’ll add these hours in there somewhere. New Year’s Eve is going to be crazy as usual, and I want you to have a quiet night to learn everything.”

  In the early evening, from seven to midnight, guests still came in to register, and Baby Poppa took care of their luggage, showed them to their rooms, and operated the elevator. Marietta was supposed to clean Mr. Powell’s office, and toward midnight, when the lobby was mostly empty of the people who had sat there earlier, she vacuumed the carpet, cleaned the furniture, and washed the big windows in front. She cleaned the marble and wood floors with a mop, and Baby Poppa showed her the large closet where all the supplies were kept. He had an old easy chair inside, where he sat to rest now and then with the door closed. But mostly he was everywhere in the hotel, going up in the elevator with drinks late at night after someone rang the desk, disappearing into the bar, where laughter rang out sometimes. She wouldn’t clean the bar until after it closed, at 1 A.M.

  Tiny Momma had said, “I gon pack you all lunch for the first day she go,” and at eleven-thirty they sat in the closet, where Baby Poppa had put a folding chair for her. They ate fried chicken and biscuits, cold sweet-potato pie. The smell of the cleaners and damp mops was strong, and Baby Poppa watched her sniff. “I’ll tell you what we do,” he said. “I eat this meal quickly, because we have a break coming at one-fifteen, when the bar is closed. I think you’ll like that free time better. Save some of your pie.”

  After the last customers had been turned away and the big, square-faced bartender named Paul had left, Marietta and Baby Poppa went into the bar and closed the doors. “I’ll have to stay watchful in the lobby,” he said, “but this won’t compromise our time too much. After all these years, it seems that I have a sixth sense for when someone wants something. Here—have a seat.”

  They sat at one of the tables near the long, gleaming wood bar littered with napkins, ashtrays, and crumbs of food. The floor was sticky under her feet. Baby Poppa was smiling, and he went behind the bar to get her a glass of ice water and a napkin. “This is the break I look forward to,” he said. “Lee only had eyes for the liquor. I brought something else for us.” He went back out and came in with two buckets. One steamed. He put the soapy-hot-water-filled bucket near the bar and brought her the other pail. Inside were rolled-up magazines, newspapers, even a paperback book.

  They spread out the magazines on the table. “This a lot of new one,” she said. “Where you get em all?”

  “Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Harper’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, and the Charleston newspaper,” he said. “People read when they travel, and they discard these when they leave. I find them everywhere, and one of the day ladies saves me the reading material from the rooms she cleans. Take your pick.”

  She thumbed through the Ladies’ Home Journal, but all the ads for cleaning supplies only reminded her that the bar area was waiting, and she grew nervous. “Ain’t we have for start?” she said.

  “First day,” he said, shaking his head. “You can’t wait. Well, we have about forty-five minutes to relax on our usual schedule. Trust me—you can clean this place leisurely and be done by two-forty-five. We leave at three. But let’s get started now, and you’ll see how quickly it goes.”

  New Year’s Day. Everyone crowded into Tiny Momma’s as usual: Jesse, Colleen, Milton, Carmen, all the kids—everyone held plates of Hoppin John and Greens, chitlins and pigs’ feet. The chitlins made the air heavy and ripe, their steam rising from the huge pot on the stove.

  Milton sat next to Marietta for a moment, but she got up after she had smiled and went to make sure Nate and Calvin didn’t have too much food on their plates. The covered dishes were on the table, and she adjusted the towels over the warm food. People stopped in and out all day. She stayed standing, tasting the peppery greens, giving Calvin more Hoppin John. Victor came in the door, with a friend named Joe and Joe’s teenage son Christian. Baby Poppa said, “No, now, I don’t want to hear that the Green Bay Packers gon win it all. Don’t even begin that litany today—the Super Bowl isn’t for two more weeks. And I want Kansas City—I’ll take the Chiefs. The Packers are a football machine without style or soul.”

  “They got points.” Victor laughed. “They ain’t gotta have no soul.”

  “Milt!” Joe said, slapping Milton on the back. “I ain’t seen you since we went down there to Mount Pleasant.”

  “How you doin?” Milton said. Marietta watched him talk to Jesse and Joe, and she moved to the kitchen to rinse plates and check the pots. Tiny Momma left her seat next to Carmen and came into the kitchen, too.

  “You better go on and sit next to him,” she hissed at Marietta. “Everybody see you ain’t spoke but a word. What you doing?”

  Marietta swirled water into the sink. “I’m cleaning dish,” she said.

  “That a good man,” Tiny Momma said, pulling at her arm. “Go on sit down now.”

  Marietta kept her elbow stiff until Tiny Momma let go. “You actin like a child,” Tiny Momma said. “Ain’t got no reason to let that man go.”

  Milton stayed for another half hour, and she eluded him carefully, picking up Jesse Jr. and taking him to the bedroom to change his diaper, staying in the kitchen, keeping bodies between Milton and her. He said, “Thanks, Momma,” to Tiny Momma, and then he leaned down to say something to Baby Poppa, who sat with the other men near the front door. After he had gone, and Joe and Victor and Christian had eaten and left, Jesse said, “Why you breakin my man’s heart?”

  Marietta sat on the couch near Colleen. “He heart ain’t broke.”

  Jesse was angry. “He ain’t did nothing wrong and you treat him like a stepchild. He ain’t gon come lookin for you forever.”

  “Good,” she said. “He need for look somewhere else.”

  Even Colleen said, “What you got against Milton?”

  Marietta said, “I ain’t got nothing for him.” Tiny Momma sucked at her teeth and Marietta’s face grew hot.

  Jesse snorted.

  “You got a problem,” he said, and Baby Poppa told him, “You are all making her very defensive. Let it go.”

  She sat, blood rising to her neck and face, thinking, Don’t none a you know me. Don’t know my problem. What I need? I don’t need worry. All I need is money. I need Nate and Calvin black—no pink show on they skin, no blood. That all I need. You all need for shut up. De-fen-sive. She stood up, saying to Baby Poppa, “I see you tonight.”

  All night, cleaning the floors and polishing Mr. Powell’s big desk with its papers stacked in piles at the edges, the word skipped in her ears—defensive. Defensive. She heard it in the roars of laughter from the bar, tried to remember.

  A defensive back stuttered his feet backward and threw out his arms to hit the receiver, or he ran, feet flying in step with the receiver, to knock away the football. She looked out the window of Baby Poppa’s and heard shouts coming from Jesse’s apartment. Tiny Momma was napping in her bedroom, while the boys were at Jesse’s with Baby Poppa, watching the Super Bowl. Marietta studied the tangled patterns on Baby Poppa’s TV, the waves made of players as they ran and hit each other, remembered the men saying all fall, “Look how s
low he is! Shit, I coulda caught that. And they gave that quarterback, what-his-name, all the time in the world.”

  A defensive back was her height, not as padded with bulk as the men who crouched at the line facing each other; the defensive backs were dark, poised on their toes, their arms hanging loose, waiting for the ball to move.

  In the mornings, the boys ate biscuits and grits, and then when they were gone to school, she napped, cooked for dinner, sat with Tiny Momma and sewed up holes in their clothes or read while Tiny Momma crocheted, winding words around her. “You been let that Milton go, I don’t see how you gon get nobody else with you crazy hours and always close-mouthed. I don’t know what you thinking about. Don’t have no man around for help.” The don’t clicked like the crochet needle against a fingernail, and they were so small that Marietta only nodded and smiled.

  With Jesse and Colleen, though, she kept her face wood. “Lotta people work nights and still speak,” Jesse said. “But now my man Milton don’t even want to come to my house, so he ain’t gotta take a chance on seeing somebody who can’t speak.” Marietta kept silent, imagining her cheeks oak and her forehead pine.

  She packed her lunch at six, kissed the boys where they lay by the TV, and walked with Baby Poppa. They passed each other in the lobby until break, ate quickly in the closet-room, and then she met him in the bar.

  “I use to keep magazine in a car fender,” she told him, and he laughed. They spread out the pages and read silently, or she asked him questions. Her favorite was Sports Illustrated. He let her pore over the football articles and ask him about the offense and defense, the pictures that were an unintelligible knot of arms and legs, and he helped her sort out the players, the positions and movements of the ball. The season was over, but he kept this stack of magazines in his room, and she agreed with him. Basketball was fast and exciting, baseball was subtle and boring, and football was the one she loved.

  He teased her. “Now you’re just saying that to please me.”

  “No.” She stopped. Why did she like it? “I tell you sometime” she said, because she wanted to think about it. He went back to the lobby and she washed the tabletops and mopped the gritty floors.

  Mrs. Despres sent her a message through Tiny Momma. “She say you the only one she trust round her furniture, sides me, and I too old to do all that she want. She havin a spring tour and she need you,” Tiny Momma said. “I told her you need you rest.”

  But Marietta couldn’t sleep more than a few hours during the day. She finished all her work and then didn’t like to sit and think, to worry about the boys and remember Pine Gardens, to pace around the small rooms. More money—she could save for birthdays, for shoes. The boys grew taller and wider still, and they ate three pieces of chicken, platefuls of greens, slabs of cornbread for dinner. A pie lasted less than a day now. She told Tiny Momma she would still work for Mrs. Despres, and she sent word to her other ladies that she would do party preparation but she wouldn’t stay after three. They had never wanted her to serve unless it was an emergency anyway, and now she only cleaned in silence, all morning and then through the night.

  She liked to keep moving, and each day was a swirl of walking, riding the bus, turning from sink to stove in the kitchen, circling the boys’ bed to pick up their things. She saw Colleen in Tiny Momma’s living room a few times, and Colleen’s belly swelled. “My girl comin now,” Jesse said, and he seemed to forgive Marietta. She knew why one day when he said, “Milton got a girl over there in Mount Pleasant, Tiny Momma. Say they might even get married next year.” He looked at Marietta pointedly, and she grinned and shrugged.

  “We finally gon have a baby girl round here,” Tiny Momma said.

  “How you know?” Colleen said, her hand always on her stomach. “Kick same like Jesse Jr.”

  “Feet don’t make a boy or girl,” Tiny Momma said. “Look how you carry, look you ain’t so sick. That a girl.”

  “We got enough boys around here,” Jesse said. “Even for me.”

  Marietta was glad that the heat of summer came and the tourists left, so that no one scheduled tours or parties, because she liked to stay home during the days with the boys. Even though they didn’t want to walk with her or go to the store the way they did when they were younger, she could sit on the piazza and watch them.

  She saw it when Nate chipped his tooth. The kids were stalking him in the yard, and his eyes were closed. Blindman’s buff. Calvin sneaked right behind him, and Nate was so busy smiling and talking that he didn’t hear anything. His hands were stiff in front of him, then waving around, but when he whirled suddenly he thrust his face forward, and his open mouth met Calvin’s smile.

  “Owww, Mama,” he cried, running toward the piazza.

  A corner of his left front tooth was gone, from the force of meeting mouths. Calvin was frightened, staring at the hole in the white line of teeth, and Nate cried, trying to hit him. The other children watched her nervously. “Big Ma mad,” one whispered. “She gon whup em silly.” But Marietta laughed, to their surprise.

  “That what you get for have you mouth crack wide every minute,” she said to Nate. “And now nobody think you Calvin, think he you.” Nate ran inside to look at the mirror, and by the next morning, he was smiling broadly and showing a pink bud of tongue through the hole.

  He went to school, running behind Calvin, and Marietta curled up on the couch as best she could. She thought of the gap in Sinbad’s teeth, his sweet mouth. She realized with surprise that she could think about him now and feel only warmth between the hipbones, that she could think of Milton and feel a warm arm around her neck or waist; she didn’t miss them, didn’t feel angry or pushed, didn’t feel anything but a pleasant taste like barbecue sauce tingling around her lips long after she’d finished eating the ribs. Not hungry anymore, just remembering. She slept all morning.

  The radio never stopped, but the listener had died, and Marietta and the others found out only because someone from the hospital where he was the night janitor came to find out why he’d missed work for days. The name on his identification was Hosea Williams. Marietta saw the white stubble on his cheeks, a forest of gray hairs against the brown skin, whiskers that had kept growing even after he stopped breathing.

  Nate and Calvin were eight now, and they watched with fascination as Hosea Williams’s body was covered and taken away by the coroner. That afternoon, when they came home from school, Nate said, “How old Baby Poppa?”

  Marietta didn’t know. She knew Tiny Momma was sixty, because they’d had a birthday party for her that year. Nineteen sixty-nine—Tiny Momma had been born in September, 1909, she liked to tell everyone: 9-19-09. But Baby Poppa never mentioned his birthday. Tiny Momma said, “He hate that foolishness, so I celebrate for him, too. Give me his presents!”

  Marietta couldn’t tell that night, looking at his face, whether he would be angry if she asked his age. They met in the bar, and she studied the reddish skin, the deep half-circles around his mouth and crescents under his eyes. A face of curves—she remembered Frank’s face of stripes. Baby Poppa held a magazine away from himself to squint at the page, and he said, “Look here at this—they had demonstrations at trade unions and construction sites in several big cities.”

  “Who?” Marietta said absently.

  “Up-North Negroes.” He shook his head. “Everybody thinks up North is better, they always try to tell me that, but the truth is, certain jobs we can’t get anywhere. They won’t hire a Negro carpenter over a white one up there, either. You can clean, though—just like this—all over the country.”

  His hands were so small next to hers when she took the magazine. While she read the article, he had gone on to the sports section of the newspaper, and when she looked up, he said, “Now here’s the only place a Negro can hit a white man and not get killed. He’ll get paid, even get cheered. Football. No marching to integrate sports—they couldn’t keep the best out.”

  She kept hearing his words all week, because she saw Nate and Calvin
as tall as Baby Poppa, towering over the other boys. Suddenly they were fighting again. Coming home from school, every boy in the neighborhood wanted to challenge them. Calvin tried to dissuade them, but Nate jumped ready, and one Thursday he came home with a bloody lip, breathing hard, and went to their room to change clothes without stopping to talk to her. She let him go, thinking she’d catch his arm when he came to the kitchen, but an older boy yelled in the yard: “Nate Cook, I come up here to whup yo ass! Come on!”

  When she went outside to scowl at the shouter, she opened her mouth in horror. A boy slightly smaller than Nate stood behind the bigger boy, and his face was swollen and thick with blood. “Nate do that?” she said.

  “He whup my little brother Timmy. You can hide him if you want, but I’ma kill him,” the older boy said.

  Marietta stood there, as breathless and shocked as she had been when she saw her boys covered with ancient dust and peach juice. Calvin came around the side yard, from the back, and the boy ran for him. “I ain’t Nate,” Calvin shouted.

  “So? You was there,” the smaller boy cried, and Marietta ran downstairs, where Calvin was rolling in the dirt with the big brother. She and Baby Poppa pulled them apart, and the older boy screamed, “I waitin for you, Cook.” He ran down the street, and Marietta called Nate outside.

  “He start it, Mama,” Nate said. “Everybody start, not me. They always want to fight us.”

  The other boy’s face had been terrible, grounds for a parent or principal to come see her. His eye was only a slit. She dragged Nate by his arm to the tiny backyard: “You come too, Calvin.”

  “I got an advantage,” she hissed when they stood, facing her, and then her hand shot out into Nate’s face. She hit him with her hard palm curved outward, on the back, the behind, the shoulders, while he ducked and cried. “I don’t have no switch—just my hand. But you don’t want fe hit me, huh? I got advantage—I bigger than you, stronger. That’s what you got with all these boys, you too big and strong, and I don’t care they come at you or no, you hit em once and tell em quit, you and Calvin hold em stop the fight. You stop em so they quit, not so they fixin to die. I never want see something like that again.”