by Maya Angelou
“Now you tell me. We been wondering about you. How come you working as a waitress? You speak such good English, you must have a diploma.”
“Yes, I do.” Shock pushed my voice out.
“You mean you graduated from high school?”
“Yes.”
“And work as a waitress?”
“Well, I can’t type or take shorthand or—”
“You remind me of Beatrice.” She shouted, “Beatrice. Come here.” I feared I was going to have to sit through the kissing again.
Beatrice stood at the door leading to the living room. “What’s on your mind?”
Johnnie Mae didn’t have time for fun. “Bee, Rita’s just like you. She finished high school.”
Beatrice, knowing that wasn’t such a grand feat said, “Really. Got your diploma, huh?”
Johnnie Mae answered for me. “Sure she got it. And works as a waitress.” I started to explain, but she stopped me. “Beatrice was a WAC. A corporal.” It was hard to believe that all that soft-looking flesh had been contained in an army uniform. “And when she got out she went to work. That’s where we met. At some rich old woman’s house. Bee was the cook and I was the housekeeper. I took one look at Bee and I have been keeping her ever since.”
Break for peals of laughter.
CHAPTER 13
“Let’s have a little grifa before dinner.” Johnnie Mae gave an order, not an invitation. She turned to me.
“You like grifa?”
“Yes. I smoke.” The truth was I had smoked cigarettes for over a year, but never marijuana. But since I had the unmitigated gall to sit up cross-legged in a lesbian apartment sipping wine, I felt I had the stamina to smoke a little grifa. Anyway, I was prepared to refuse anything else they offered me, so I didn’t feel I could very well refuse the pot.
Beatrice laid down a Prince Albert can on the table with cigarette papers.
“Do you want to roll it?” Johnnie Mae was being gracious.
“No thanks. I don’t roll very well.” I hadn’t seen loose tobacco and cigarette papers since I’d left the South, five years earlier. My brother and I used to roll lumpy cigarettes for my uncle on a small hand-cranking machine when he’d run out of ready rolls.
She took the papers and deftly began to sift marijuana. I tried not to appear too curious as the grains of tobacco fell into the cupped paper.
“I’d like to use your bathroom.”
“Sure. You know where it is.”
I talked to the bathroom mirror. “You have nothing to be nervous about. You’ll get out of this. Don’t you always get out of everything? Marijuana is not habit-forming. Thousands of people have smoked it. The Indians and Mexicans and it didn’t send them mad. Just wash your hands”—which were damp—“and go back to the living room. Keep your cool. Cool.”
I inhaled the smoke as casually as if the small brown cigarette I held were the conventional commercial kind.
“No. No. Don’t waste the grifa. Hand it here.” She dragged the cigarette and made the sound of folks slurping tea from a saucer.
“But I like it my way.” Stubborn to the end.
“Well, try it like this.” Again the rattling sound.
“All right. I will.” I opened my throat and kept my tongue flat so that the smoke found no obstacle in its passage from my lips to my throat. It tore the lining off my tonsils, made my nasal passages burn like red pepper and choked me. While I coughed, gagging, those silly bitches laughed. They would be sitting there with those vapid wrinkles on their faces while I choked to death. Wouldn’t they do anything for me? No. Beatrice rescued the joint and sucked in the smoke, puffing out her already fat cheeks to bursting, while her lady love was busily engaged in rolling another stick of tearing fire.
Before the cough stopped shaking me, I had decided I would get even with them. They were lesbians, which was sinful enough, but they were also inconsiderate, stupid bitches. I reached again for the marijuana.
The food was the best I’d ever tasted. Every morsel was an experience of sheer delight. I lost myself in a haze of sensual pleasure, enjoying not only the tastes but the feel of the food in my mouth, the smells, and the sound of my jaws chewing.
“She’s got a buzz. That’s her third helping.”
I looked up to see the two women looking at me and laughing. Their faces seemed to be mostly teeth. White teeth staggering inside dark lips. They were embarrassingly ugly, and yet there was something funny about it. They had no idea that they were so strange-looking. I laughed at their ignorance, and they, probably thinking themselves to be laughing at mine, joined me. When I remembered how they were ready to let me choke to death and how I vowed to get them, the tears rolled down my cheeks. That was really funny. They didn’t know what I was thinking and I didn’t know what form my revenge would take.
“Let’s have some sounds.” Beatrice got up from the table. We were by magic back in the murky living room. Johnnie Mae stood putting records on the player. She turned to me as the first record began to play. “You said you’re studying how to dance. Do us a dance.” Lil Green’s voice whined out the sadful lyrics:
“In the dark, in the dark, I get such a thrill.
when you press your fingertips upon my lils.”
I couldn’t explain that I didn’t do dancing alone to music like that. At the studio I did stretches, extensions, pliés and relevés to Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky.
It was considered normal in gatherings to ask a child or even an adult to entertain. The talented person was expected to share his gift. The singer was asked to “Sing us a little song!” and the person with a gift of memorizing was asked to “Render us a poem!” In my mother’s house I had often been called to show what I was studying at dance school. The overstuffed chairs were pulled back and I would dance in the cleared living-room space. I hummed inaudibly and moved precisely from ballet position one straight into a wobbling arabesque. Mother’s company would set their highballs down to applaud.
I decided to dance for my hostesses. The music dipped and swayed, pulling and pushing. I let my body rest on the sound and turned and bowed in the tiny room. The shapes and forms melted until I felt I was in a charcoal sketch, or a sepia watercolor.
When the record finished I stopped. The two women sat on the sofa. Made solemn.
“That was good. Wasn’t it, baby?”
“Sure was.”
“Dance with Beatrice. I don’t mind. Go on. Beatrice, dance with Rita.”
Again, order was in her voice. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was dance with another woman. Johnnie Mae got up and started the Lil Green song again and Beatrice moved up close to me. She put her arm around my waist and took my left hand as if we were going to waltz. It was crushing. Not only was she fat and soft and a head shorter than I, her big breasts rubbed against my stomach. She stuck her thigh between my knees and we wobbled around the room.
This was the ultimate insult. I would vent my spleen on those thickheaded lecherous old hags. They couldn’t do me this way and get away with it.
“That’s right, Beatrice, do the dip.” The woman did a fancy step and bent back, pulling me with her. I nearly toppled over. Mercifully, the record finished after what seemed one thousand hours and I was allowed to return to the sofa.
“You all look good together. Beatrice can sure dance, can’t she? Come here, baby, and give me a kiss.”
I got up and made room for Beatrice.
“No. You can stay.” She encircled Beatrice, whose face was heavy with submission.
“Have to go to the toilet again.” Let the mental machine do its work. In the bathroom an idea bloomed. They were whores. Why not encourage them in their chosen profession? From what I understood, whores can never get enough money, and since they had so little, I dressed my newborn creation carefully and took it back to the living room. I asked if we could turn down the music because I wanted to talk.
“Rita wants to talk.” They broke out of their embrace. Nasty t
hings.
“I just thought I might be able to help you keep this place. You like it so much and you’ve made it so cute, it’d be a shame if you lost it.”
They nearly became maudlin in their agreement.
“Well, I could rent it, and you could continue to stay.”
“You mean you pay the rent and we pay you back.”
“No. I’ll rent the place in my name, I’ll have the lights and gas put in my name. And pay everything. And three nights a week or four nights a week, you all stay here and turn tricks.”
Beatrice’s silly little voice complained: “You mean to turn our home into a whorehouse?”
Well, whores lived in it and it was a house. “Do you realize if the trade builds up, you can buy a place of your own and fix it just like this?” And they probably would.
“Where would we get the tricks?” Ever-practical Johnnie Mae.
“We’d get white taxi drivers and give them a percentage.” My brain was clicking along like a Santa Fe train. A-hooting and a-howling. “They could be told the hours, like between ten and two. Then if every trick is twenty dollars, they get five and we split the fifteen. Seven-fifty for you. Seven-fifty for me.”
“We don’t want to be whores. I mean, full time.” Old big little Beatrice already scared. What did she do in the WACS? Seduce young girls?
“Tricking four days a week isn’t full time,” I said. “And anyway, if you’re successful, you can quit it in six months. Go and buy you a little place. Fact is, you could even get a bigger house.” And get even more junk in it.
Johnnie Mae looked at me with suspicion. “When did you figure all that out?”
“Well, I’ve been wanting to go into business. So I’d been saving my money. I had been thinking in terms of a hamburger stand, but this place is so perfect.” And so were they. “If all three of us save, do you realize we could open a restaurant in a year? Beatrice as the chef. You and I as managers.”
I was getting to them. “I had a little operation up the coast. A three-girl deal, but I had to close down.” Admiration and a little fear showed in their faces. They hadn’t bargained for what they were getting.
Johnnie Mae, not wanting to believe what she already believed, asked, “Why were you working as a waitress?”
Should I tell them in order to eat and pay for my son’s keep, so they’d throw me down on that uncomfortable sofa and rape me? “I needed a front. Cops after me.”
“Cops!” Both of them screamed. Like many weak people they wanted to milk the cow, at the same time denying the smell of bullshit. I saw immediately that I had gone too far.
“Not after me myself. One of my girls, but I wanted to lay a cover for myself.”
Beatrice said, “You’re awfully young to be in the rackets.”
“I’ve been around, baby.” I rolled my eyes to indicate distant and mysterious places. “Well, how does it sound? Say we say Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Then you’re free for church on Sunday and—”
“We’d better talk about it.”
“I’m off tomorrow and I can get all the business taken care of. No time like the present.”
“We only have the two bedrooms. Where will you work?”
I almost shouted at the tall woman. Me, turn tricks? What did she think I was? “I’m going to stay on at the restaurant. Shouldn’t call attention to myself, you understand. But you won’t be alone. I’ll have somebody here to watch out for you. Just leave it to me.”
I became pompously professional, which was never hard for me, being my father’s daughter. “If you’ll let me have a tablet and a pen, I’ll take the landlord’s address.”
“Beatrice. Get some paper.”
I moved over to the table, shifting the dinner dishes and crumbs out of my way as Johnnie Mae dictated.
“What’s this address again?”
She gave it to me and I wrote it over and over on slips of paper.
“What you doing now?” Johnnie Mae wasn’t bright, but she’d always be too clever to just go for the okey-doke. I put it in my mind that I’d better keep that in my mind.
“When I leave here, I’m going to start drumming up business,” I said. “In a few weeks we’ll be thousandaires.”
“What?”
“That’s just a step from millionaires. Let’s have a drink on it.” Beatrice poured. The first mouthful nearly sent me reeling. It made contact with the grifa in my brain. For a lightning second I was sober with a clear recollection of what I had done, then blissfully I was high again. An authority in charge of affairs.
I said good-bye, alluded again to the wonderful food and the wonderful future we had in store, and walked out of the house.
I was certain that my heartlessness regarding the women stemmed from a natural need for revenge. After all my soggy sentimentality for the misunderstood, no one could have convinced me that I was merely acting out society’s hate for the “other ones.”
However, an irony struck me before I reached the little one-foot wire fence that guarded the pavement from the yard. In a successful attempt to thwart a seduction I had ended up with two whores and a whorehouse. And I was just eighteen.
CHAPTER 14
“Good evening, driver.”
“Yeah.”
“Are there enough houses of ill repute to service the naval personnel?”
“Whaat?”
“I know you’re generally paid four dollars on a twenty-dollar customer (I guessed, I didn’t know), but if, after Thursday night ten o’clock, you bring clients to this address, you’ll be remunerated to the tune of five dollars per head.”
You had to be very careful in speaking to whites, and especially white men. My mother said that when a white man sees your teeth he thinks he sees your underclothes.
I had managed in a few tense years to become a snob on all levels, racial, cultural and intellectual. I was a madam and thought myself morally superior to the whores. I was a waitress and believed myself cleverer than the customers I served. I was a lonely unmarried mother and held myself to be freer than the married women I met.
—
Hank was the club’s erratic bouncer. Erratic because sometimes he didn’t show up, and other times, when his habits hit him, he bounced people onto the sidewalk who had done no more than offend his sensibilities. He spent a few nights monthly in the drunk tank, and was always taken back on his release.
The other waitresses hinted that Hank did a few private jobs for the boss. Secretly I believed the man was afraid of Hank, rightly, for there was no way to anticipate him. He might see in a stranger qualities of great worth, or he might develop an active hate for a person’s color.
He had kind of adopted me on my arrival, and at the earliest opportunity I approached him. “Hank, I want to know if you’d look after some business for me?”
In another century that face would have so frightened a slave owner that he would have been compelled to lash the broad back and shackle the wide hands.
“Yeah, li’l sister. What’s the matter?”
“You know the two les—bull daggers who come in here?”
“They ain’t been messing with you, is they?”
“Oh no.” The reverse. “They’ve asked me to back them in a business. Whorehouse, to be exact. Wednesday to Saturday. And you’re the only person I can trust to watch out for my end. I figure to pay you one third of my take.”
His mouth hung open. “You’re going to be turning tricks?”
“Not me, I’m going to keep on working, but they will. Could you manage the place for me? Watch out for the police and keep track of the money?”
After much repeating myself, he agreed. I created an elaborate system of chits, which would be given to the women and the cabdrivers. At around two-thirty in the morning Hank was to put on a porch light denoting a clear coast, and I would go in and pay off the workers.
I had a vague worry—that a sudden large bank account would put the vice squad on my trail. I wasn’t afraid o
f the police, since I wasn’t turning tricks myself, but I was terrified of how a police investigation would influence Mother Cleo. She’d toss me and my baby out of the house with much damning me to the depths of hell. There were other places to live of course, and with the money piling up in secret places I could afford anyone to tend my child, but the fact was that I cared for the Jenkinses and what they thought of me was important.
Their home and their ways reminded me of the grandmother who raised me and whom I idolized. I wouldn’t have them offended. When my illicit business reached its peak, I joined their church, and stood in the choir singing the old songs with great feeling.
One afternoon Mother Cleo remarked, “I know something.” And smiled a leer. Panic set in.
“What?”
“You doing something.” She sang the accusation like schoolchildren promising to tell.
“What? I’m not doing anything.” The ready lie at my tongue.
“You got yourself a fella.”
Of all things, how could she come up with that? However wrong she was, I perceived she wasn’t angry, and it would be safer to lie again.
I asked, “How did you know?” Pleased now that she had caught me.
“ ’Cause you’re coming in later than you used to. Me, I’m a light sleeper. Mr. Henry can sleep till the cows come home, but taking care of children makes me a light sleeper. I hear every footfall. You used to be in around two twenty-five, two-thirty. Now you get in sometimes its three-thirty. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, is he a nice boy? Work where you work, don’t he?”
“How do you know so much, Mother Cleo?”
“ ’Cause anybody else couldn’t stay up every night till you get off. If you want to, he can come ’round here to see you.”
I started. “Not at night. But in the daytime, I don’t mind.” That was more like it. With so many unexpected things happening I would be very unhappy to see Mother Cleo’s morals slip.