Like One of the Family

by Alice Childress

  The significance of Mildred’s voice is obvious. Childress lets us hear the many women in Afro-American history whose occupations have silenced them. Through Mildred, we are again aware of numerous indignities that the majority of black women workers in this country experienced, for, indeed, the majority of them were domestic workers. While certainly some of the southern experiences differed from the northern ones in degree, they did not differ in kind. The women were uniformly overworked, expected to neglect their families for those of their white employers, and frequently expected to accept hand-me-downs and service pans—the name for leftover food domestic workers were given to take home to their families—instead of remuneration for their extensive expenditure of labor. By daring to look low, to depict another character type in Afro-American fiction, Childress gave to the literature a dimension that it had rarely had before.

  Notwithstanding the silence surrounding the publication of the volume, Childress’s creation of Mildred, a working-class black woman who commanded the attention of a volume rather than a part of it, was unlike anything preceding it in Afro-American literature. The tradition of the tragic mulatto in the nineteenth century required idealized, overly educated, overly sentimentalized portraits of black women. The plantation tradition to which Charles Waddell Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar reacted required stylized figures, familiar stereotypes such as Mammy Jane Letlow in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and only fleeting glimpses of more complex female characters. More complex characters, such as Irene Redfield in Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), share some of the extraterrestrial features of their nineteenth-century sisters in accomplishments, beauty, and separation from the masses of blacks. Only Janie Crawford in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Lutie Johnson in Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) came close to realistic presentation of working-class characters without middle-class embellishments, but even Janie is supported by a middle-class husband and Lutie’s vision is marred by an unwavering adherence to the destructive preachments of the American Dream. Nor is Mildred bogged down in the quagmire of judging herself by a standard of physical beauty antithetical to her racial background, as is the case with Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, which appeared in 1953.

  Mildred breaks the mold of casting black women as alien to or bemoaning their own experiences in order to make them acceptable to white audiences. She was conceived to reflect as exactly as literature ever imitates life the experiences of those who would be reading about her. Her difficulties on the job tie her most closely to the black masses, but her conversations about social situations as well as her own personal circumstances are also close to home. Readers can easily imagine the encounters Mildred had with racists at public facilities, or her partying with friends, or her being involved in church and community work.

  By selecting her character from the lower echelons of black society, Childress exemplified her determination to respect and present without condescension those folks who are just folks—living, loving, working, being. Childress thus anticipates the portrayal of similar characters in works by writers in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Gloria Naylor’s Mattie Michael and Ciel Turner in The Women of Brewster Place (1982). The lack of embellishment in characterization also anticipates Alice Walker’s portrayal of Mem and Margaret Copeland in The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), and Hannah Kemhuff and Rannie Toomer in In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973); these women are what they are—commoners, farmers, church workers, women who engage our attention without being painted as some superhuman examples in the form of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) or Charles Chesnutt’s Rena Walden in The House Behind the Cedars (1900).

  Childress, then, though frequently unread and more frequently out of print, captured in Like One of the Family a vein so true to Afro-American life and culture that many post-1950s creations of black women must find their genesis in her depiction of Mildred. Not a wandering, passive Janie, or a predetermined, disillusioned Lutie Johnson, Mildred is a black woman who knows that black women, even when they have been domestic servants, have had dignity and a degree of self-determination to sustain and define themselves against frightful odds.

  In this sense, Childress and Mildred represent a continuity in Afro-American literature and history that was unlike any other. What they shared touched the heart of the development of Afro-American communities in this country. During slavery, black women had worked in the big houses as servants or in the fields beside black men. During Reconstruction, when the forty acres and a mule were not forthcoming, black women could still use their skills as domestics to find jobs and try to hold their families together. Some still worked in the fields, but the majority of them were domestic servants. Forced to adopt individual strategies for interacting with their white employers, and isolated from other workers, these women sometimes found themselves in a new form of slavery. If they were worked and not paid, there was no union to which they could complain. If they were accused of stealing, their claims of Christian virtue would not alleviate the charges. If they were fired without notice, they simply had to look for other employment.

  Childress and Mildred showed the problems peculiar to domestic workers, and they illustrated the center from which many attendant problems in black communities had grown for the domestic herself as well as in terms of the popular conceptions of her. The integral place of the domestic in black American experience suggests that the black woman as maid is the basic historical conception from which other images and stereotypes have grown. Dependency on service pans foreshadows the dependency of welfare, for certainly that paternalistic phenomenon influenced social expectations. Sexual exploitation of the maid by the employer’s husband, which is a direct extension of slavery, may have contributed its share to the stereotyped images of the black woman as hot momma or unwed mother. And the parallels continue; the relationship between mistress and maid explains, in part, other images of black women in the popular imagination as well as in the literature.

  After reading Like One of the Family, I began to wonder why I had not heard more of Alice Childress. The reason is that like Mildred and Childress’s real-life Aunt Lorraine upon whom Mildred’s character is based, Childress is a writer who “refused to exchange dignity for pay.” Such refusal can be costly; the cost for Childress was that her Mildred stories were printed more frequently and more widely read in other countries than in the United States. It also implied that her refusal to blunt her barbed attacks made her nationalistic views unpopular in the assimilationist climate of the 1950s. Her outspoken Mildred had little of the God-fearing, long-suffering tolerance that would characterize Lorraine Hansberry’s Mama Lena Younger a few years later in A Raisin in the Sun.

  Childress’s claim to artistic freedom paralleled Mildred’s claim to physical and psychological freedom in her violations of space requirements in the homes of the whites for whom she worked. Childress’s refusal to adhere to the expected portrayals of downtrodden, suffering, victimized black women in literature was just as effective as Mildred sitting in the living rooms of her employers and violating their notions of what domestics ought to do and be. Both gained a freedom and a greater sense of self by not allowing outside forces to define them.

  In Mildred, Childress seldom romanticizes the domestic worker, but she does suggest that that position was not ultimately so negating that it does not warrant celebration in the literature. Like One of the Family celebrates the image of black women most common to their history and suggests that they are no less dignified for having spent time on their knees. Mildred scrubs and soars. In both postures lies the complexity of black women.

  Notes

  1. Alice Childress, “Knowing the Human Condition,” in Black American Literature and Humanism, ed. R. Baxter Miller (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1981), p. 10.

  2. Alice Childress, “A Candle in a Gale Wind,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Dou
bleday/Anchor, 1984), p. 112.

  3. “Florence,” in Masses and Mainstream 3 (October 1950): 34–47.

  4. Trudier Harris, From Mammies to Militants; Domestics in Black American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982).

  5. According to Childress, many black militant domestics, led by Mrs. Nina Evans, a domestic worker, often met in a rented studio room on 110th Street in Harlem. They were trying to form, a domestic workers’ union.

  6. Kathryn Morgan, Children of Strangers: The Stories of a Black Family (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 15.

  7. Information in this paragraph and in sections of the comments on specific conversations in the following paragraphs is taken from From Mammies to Militants.

  8. Childress reports that “The Health Card,” “The Pocketbook Game,” and “Mrs. James” all happened to her as a day worker.

  9. Autherine Lucy, a black woman, attempted to integrate the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa in 1956, several years before the University was actually integrated in the early 1960s.

  10. Letter from Alice Childress to Trudier Harris, dated January 7, 1980. Remaining quotations by Childress are from this source.

  11. Helen Davis, review of Like One of the Family, in Masses and Mainstream 9 (July 1956): 50–51.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  By Trudier Harris

  Works by Alice Childress

  BOOKS

  Like One of the Family … Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Independence Publishers, 1956)

  Wine in the Wilderness: A Comedy-Drama (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1969)

  Mojo and String: Two Plays (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1971)

  A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973)

  Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White (New York: French, 1973)

  When the Rattlesnake Sounds (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1975)

  Let’s Hear It for the Queen (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1976)

  A Short Walk (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979)

  Rainbow Jordan (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981)

  PLAY PRODUCTIONS

  Florence, New York, American Negro Theatre, 1949

  Just a Little Simple, adapted from Langston Hughes’s collection Simple

  Speaks His Mind, New York, Club Baron Theatre, September 1950 Gold Through the Trees, New York, Club Baron Theatre, 1952

  Trouble in Mind, New York, Greenwich Mews Theatre, 4 November 1955

  Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, December 1966

  String, adapted from Guy de Maupassant’s story “A Piece of String,” New York, St. Marks Playhouse, 25 March 1969

  The Freedom Drum, retitled Young Martin Luther King, Performing Arts Repertory Theatre, on tour 1969–1972

  Mojo: A Black Love Story, New York, New Heritage Theatre, November 1070

  Sea Island Song, Charleston, South Carolina, Stage South, 1977

  Gullah, Amherst, University of Massachusetts, 1984

  SCREENPLAY

  A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, adapted from Childress’s novel of the same title, New World Pictures, 1977

  TELEVISION

  Wine in the Wilderness, in “On Being Black,” Boston, WGBH, 4 March 1969

  Wedding Band, ABC, 1973

  String, for Vision (series), PBS, 1979

  OTHER

  The World on a Hill, in Plays to Remember, Literary Heritage Series (New York: Macmillan, 1968)

  Black Scenes, edited by Childress (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971)—includes a scene from Childress’s The African Garden, pp. 137–45

  Trouble in Mind, in Black Theatre, edited by Lindsay Patterson (New York: New American Library, 1971), pp. 135–74

  “Knowing the Human Condition,” in Black American Literature and Humanism, edited by R. Baxter Miller (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1981), pp. 8–10

  PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS:DRAMA

  Florence, A One Act Drama, in Masses and Mainstream 3 (October1950): 34–47

  NONFICTION

  “For a Negro Theatre,” Masses and Mainstream 4 (February 1951): 61–64

  “The Negro Woman in American Literature,” Freedomways 6 (Winter 1966): 14–19, reprinted as “A Woman Playwright Speaks Her Mind,” in Anthology of the Afro-American in the Theatre: A Critical Approach, edited by Lindsay Patterson (Cornwells Heights, Pa.: Publishers Agency, 1978), pp. 75–79

  “ ‘Why Talk About That?,’ ” Negro Digest 16 (April 1967): 17–21

  “Black Writers’ Views on Literary Lions and Values,” Negro Digest 17 (January 1968): 36, 85–87

  “ ‘But I Do My Thing,’ ” in “Can Black and White Artists Still Work Together?,” New York Times, 2 February 1969, II: 1, 9

  “The Soul Man,” Essence (May 1971): 68–69, 94

  “Tributes—to Paul Robeson,” Freedomways 11 (First Quarter 1971):14–15

  Secondary Sources

  Abramson, Doris E. Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925–1959. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969, pp. 188–204, 258–59.

  Brown, Janet. Feminist Drama: Definitions and Critical Analysis. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1979, pp. 56–70.

  Curb, Rosemary. “An Unfashionable Tragedy of American Racism: Alice Childress’ Wedding Band.” MELUS 7 (Winter 1980): 57–68.

  Evans, Mari. Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor, 1984, pp. 111–34.

  Harris, Trudier. From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.

  ____. “ ‘I wish I was a poet’: The Character as Artist in Alice Childress’s

  Like One of the Family,” Black American Literature Forum, 14 (Spring 1980): 24–30.

  Miller, Jeanne-Marie A. “Images of Black Women in Plays by Black Playwrights.” College Language Association Journal 20 (June 1977): 494–507.

  Mitchell, Loften. Black Drama: The Story of the American Negro in the Theatre. New York; Hawthorn Books, 1977.

  ___. “Three Writers and a Dream,” Crisis 72 (April 1965): 219–23.

  LIKE ONE OF THE FAMILY

  HI MARGE! I have had me one hectic day…. Well, I had to take out my crystal ball and give Mrs. C … a thorough reading. She’s the woman that I took over from Naomi after Naomi got married…. Well, she’s a pretty nice woman as they go and I have never had too much trouble with her, but from time to time she really gripes me with her ways.

  When she has company, for example, she’ll holler out to me from the living room to the kitchen: “Mildred dear! Be sure and eat both of those lamb chops for your lunch!” Now you know she wasn’t doing a thing but tryin’ to prove to the company how “good” and “kind” she was to the servant, because she had told me already to eat those chops.

  Today she had a girl friend of hers over to lunch and I was real busy afterwards clearing the things away and she called me over and introduced me to the woman…. Oh no, Marge! I didn’t object to that at all. I greeted the lady and then went back to my work…. And then it started! I could hear her talkin’ just as loud … and she says to her friend, “We just love her! She’s like one of the family and she just adores our little Carol! We don’t know what we’d do without her! We don’t think of her as a servant!” And on and on she went … and every time I came in to move a plate off the table both of them would grin at me like chessy cats.

  After I couldn’t stand it any more, I went in and took the platter off the table and gave ’em both a look that would have frizzled a egg…. Well, you might have heard a pin drop and then they started talkin’ about something else.

  When the guest leaves, I go in the living room and says, “Mrs. C …, I want to have a talk with you.”

  “By all means,” she says.

  I drew up a chair and read her thusly: “Mrs. C …, you are
a pretty nice person to work for, but I wish you would please stop talkin’ about me like I was a cocker spaniel or a poll parrot or a kitten. … Now you just sit there and hear me out.

  “In the first place, you do not love me; you may be fond of me, but that is all…. In the second place, I am not just like one of the family at all! The family eats in the dining room and I eat in the kitchen. Your mama borrows your lace tablecloth for her company and your son entertains his friends in your parlor, your daughter takes her afternoon nap on the living room couch and the puppy sleeps on your satin spread … and whenever your husband gets tired of something you are talkin’ about he says, ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake, forget it…’ So you can see I am not just like one of the family.

  “Now for another thing, I do not just adore your little Carol. I think she is a likable child, but she is also fresh and sassy. I know you call it ‘uninhibited’ and that is the way you want your child to be, but luckily my mother taught me some inhibitions or else I would smack little Carol once in a while when she’s talkin’ to you like you’re a dog, but as it is I just laugh it off the way you do because she is your child and I am not like one of the family.

  “Now when you say, ‘We don’t know what we’d do without her’ this is a polite lie … because I know that if I dropped dead or had a stroke, you would get somebody to replace me.

  “You think it is a compliment when you say, ‘We don’t think of her as a servant….’ but after I have worked myself into a sweat cleaning the bathroom and the kitchen … making the beds … cooking the lunch … washing the dishes and ironing Carol’s pinafores … I do not feel like no weekend house guest. I feel like a servant, and in the face of that I have been meaning to ask you for a slight raise which will make me feel much better toward everyone here and make me know my work is appreciated.

  “Now I hope you will stop talkin’ about me in my presence and that we will get along like a good employer and employee should.”