This portrait of Queenie, who lives in Harlem and works on Central Park West, is the third of Donald Paneth’s sketches of New York life to appear in our pages; the earlier ones, “I Cash Clothes!” and “Bronx Housewife,” were published in our issues of June 1950 and February 1951.

_____________

 

Saturday night is going out night. And Queenie Jones puts on her best print dress and lipstick. She curls her hair, and paints her nails. Queenie Jones carries a navy-blue purse with a gold catch on Saturday night, and plays a social game of cards in a tiny, shabby apartment in Harlem. Queenie and her friends, fifteen or twenty, play a cheap game, for a nickel or dime: they’re a social crowd, not a rough, gambling bunch; they’re working people, out on Saturday night. They play poker and blackjack at crowded tables in every room until one in the morning or two. They talk, joke, smoke, and drink beer. Sometimes Queenie cooks a big Southern meal: corn bread, candied sweets, and fried chicken, and everyone eats with appetite. Queenie plays blackjack with skill—poker not so well—and sometimes she wins $15 or $20 in an evening. When she wins, she laughs, and her eyes roll, and her big body shakes, and she claps her hands.

Queenie is a steadfast Baptist; but she plays cards with equal enthusiasm and regularity. When she plays she is excited and absorbed, but careful. She won’t lose more than $5 at once; that’s her Saturday night limit. “My friends call me a Scotchman,” she says, chuckling. “If my luck’s bad, I quits.” Once she won $90 in an evening. “I was so excited,” she says, “I thought I’d die. I thought my heart would come out. Everybody stayed and tried to break me. But more they stayed, more I gained. Right away, I spent it. Gambling money doesn’t stay with me. I buy things with it. Clothing or something for the house. It’s a big help.” Sometimes, Queenie wonders if card playing is reconcilable with chuchgoing; but she plays. “I do it mostly as a recreation,” she says. “I look forward to Saturday night. I’m glad when it comes. After all, you can’t work all your life, and have no fun.”

Queenie is a housemaid who lives in Harlem and works on Central Park West She is a short, heavy woman, forty-five years old. Her legs and arms and torso are thick; her bosom is broad; her face is black, cheerful, serene, and round, with large lips, a broad nose, and black curly hair; she speaks quickly but with a soft drawl. Her clothing is poor. She wears a blue polka dot dress, black cloth coat, black felt hat, black flat shoes, lisle stockings, and two trinkets, a little silver bracelet and a thin silver wedding band. Queenie moves slowly and ponderously—she weighs two hundred and forty pounds—but her size doesn’t seriously impede her. “I got hard fat,” she says. “Muscle. It doesn’t keep me down. I’m active. I can bend, and reach, and climb up on the chandelier.”

She busies herself day and night. She works six days a week for a family she has known since she came North from Virginia in 1927. She dusts, washes, irons, and cooks with energy; and one evening a week, when there are guests, she serves dinner. “I keep the house,” she says. “I give a good moving out, and clean and shine the silver, and scrub and wax the kitchen floor.” She earns a meager living, $34 a week. “I like to make an honest living,” she says. “I wouldn’t sponge on relief. I don’t wear too fancy clothes, and I haven’t any diamonds or fur coats, but I make out. It doesn’t take too much. I don’t smoke and I don’t drink.” When food prices go up Queenie eats more vegetables. “They’re cheap and good,” she says. When she needs a winter coat, once every five years, she pays one-third down, and the remainder in small monthly installments. “I have a good charge account,” she says. “My record’s all clear.” When the family for whom she works buys a new radio, or toaster, or clock, she gets the old model. And any week she needs some extra cash she asks for a few dollars more.

Queenie lives alone in a small three-room Harlem flat; she has been separated from her husband, John Peters, nineteen years. “We didn’t make a go of it,” she says. “Which I’m not ashamed to say. So much of it’s going on.” At night Queenie deliberately occupies herself; she walks, and buys a dozen roses from a peddler for a quarter, or sees a movie, or listens to the radio, or washes and irons for herself. Frequency she goes to bed early. “It’s best to be busy,” she says. ‘This is New York. A fast place, with bright lights. So many things tempt you. Somebody comes by in a car and toots the horn at you. Wanna get in, honey? Wanna good time, baby? Tangle with a bad bunch and they don’t let you get away from them. They make you stay.” At work or off, Queenie is cheerful and friendly. She is talkative, and she laughs easily—her laugh is deep and bountiful and free—and she is seldom depressed. “I have very few sad days,” she says. “I don’t let them stay with me. Of course, I have aches and pains. Well, who doesn’t? I get busy, and go out. I don’t believe in feeling sad. I don’t believe in worrying. I don’t sit and pull my hair and get gray. I don’t figure it gets you any place.”

_____________

 

Queenie is religious, and on Sunday she goes to church. The Baptist service begins at eleven, and she sings, and prays, contributes a dime to the weekly collection, and listens attentively to the pastor’s sermon.

“That’s the important part,” she says. “He speaks from the Bible and explains it to you. And brings in a little joke—to wake you up.” At church Queenie enjoys singing jubilees—“Abide with Me,” “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,” “Oh, When I Come to the End of My Journey.” “A lot of the time,” Queenie says, “good music is better than speakers. Music is lively. I get happy from a jubilee, and cry. I feel good.” On the month’s first Sunday, Queenie gives her testimony, a vocal declaration of faith. Some in the congregation rise, shout, wave their arms, leave their seats, and run up and down the aisle. But Queenie is quiet: she doesn’t shout or run. “I feel the spirit,” she says. “It hits me. I thank God for sparing me to see another first Sunday, for letting me live so many years, and for my finances. But I don’t shout it out. I believe in living it, not talking it. But you get some sinner who doesn’t know God and who wants to be saved. He’ll get excited and go on and on and on till it’s closing time.” But, though Queenie is religious, she isn’t devout. “You have to get religion,” she says. “You have to believe if you want to be saved. I believe. I believe there’s a God. I believe there’s a Heaven. But I’m not sure about Hell. I don’t think God would let you burn; I think they say it to make you be good. Anyway I wouldn’t go to Hell; I’m not doing anything. I’ll go to Heaven. Heaven is a resting place for your spirit when you die. Your body goes in the ground, but your spirit floats around. It wanders uptown, downtown, or in this apartment. I often hear things in here. That’s my father—God bless the dead—walking softly. I can’t see him and I know he’d never let me see him. So I don’t get frightened.” The church service on Sunday is over at two. And as her pastor pronounces the benediction, Queenie raises her right hand as if to hail the Lord. “Amen,” she says softly.

Queenie, who is inexcitable, meets racial prejudice with some resignation, disregard, and some resentment. She votes resolutely for Democrats each November, but signs no petitions, attends no meetings, distributes no literature, belongs to no anti-discrimination groups. “I take a back seat,” she says. “Read about it in the paper like a million others. I never had time for agitating. I had to work. In the South I didn’t even vote. Didn’t bother with it. But, when I came North my friends got after me. “Why don’t you vote?’ they said. I started in ‘32, for Roosevelt. It was a good thing to do. Roosevelt was a good man; he helped the colored people.” To some extent, Queenie accepts Jim Crow as a condition of life. “My mother—God bless the dead—took it like I do,” she says. ‘Whatever is just is. Down South you’re sectioned off. You can’t eat in any restaurant, or go in any movie, and you have to go in back of the bus. Some colored people would start a riot. But it doesn’t bother me. I figure I’m as good as anybody. So I take it easy. I go ahead and do what I’m supposed to.” But she reacts angrily when she hears a white person use the word “nigger.” “I don’t like that name,” she says. “I get sore when I hear it. Call me a skunk or a bum, Negro or colored. But not that; it hurts.” The existence of prejudice itself bewilders her. “Those people,” she says. “You can’t do anything with them. I wouldn’t say they was crazy, but I wouldn’t say they was very bright. That’s in them strong—from their parents. I can’t figure why they let us clean or wash or cook for them. And my mother told me this story. Back in slavery time, on one plantation, the white man’s wife had a baby. But she didn’t have enough milk. Well, a slave had just had a child and she nursed the white baby for seven months; her milk was good enough. That’s why it’s a puzzle to me.”

She feels it will be a long time before the Negro is accepted, equal, and free. “It’s such a slow thing,” she says. “I won’t see it.” Until then, she believes the Negro must work and strive with faith. “One Saturday night,” she says, “I was at a party. There was a young kid. He married at twenty, and right away his wife had children. ‘Congratulations on your second child,’ I said. Why?’ he said. ‘No colored people are born for good luck.’ ‘G’wan,’ I said. ‘If you have your health you’re lucky. Don’t be down on life. Pick yourself up; go out and work; do the best you can.’”

_____________

 

Queenie Jones works on Central Park West for Mrs. Henry Bergman, and for her oldest son, Robert. Mrs. Bergman is a tall, stout, gray lady with a direct manner. Her husband, a moderately successful lawyer, died twelve years ago; she lives with her unmarried sons, Richard, twenty-eight, and Howard, twenty-three, in a large, sunny four-room apartment overlooking the park. Robert, who is a lawyer, was married two years ago to a young music teacher; they live several blocks away, in three rooms. Queenie works on alternate days for Robert and his mother, and she has a key to each apartment. “If they’re home or not home,” she says, “I walk in. Whatever they want done I’m willing to do, and I do it. That’s the way we get along.” Queenie likes housework. “I like cooking,” she says, “and I like keeping things clean. I didn’t go too far in school. So I have to do house or factory work. And I don’t like factory work.”

In the family, Queenie is a godmother rather than a maid. She helped raise three boys, and she has a deep affection for them, which they return; she carries snapshots of them in her purse. Howard seeks her in the kitchen. “He complains to me,” she says. “I’m his wailing wall. He doesn’t like his job; he wants a better job. He doesn’t like New York; he wants to go to California.” Richard is her closest pal. Like Queenie, he is large, cheerful, and good-natured. They talk for hours; and Queenie speaks openly with him. During the war, when he was a radio operator in the merchant marine, he brought her gifts-handkerchiefs, fans, coins, perfume—from every port; she still displays them to her friends with delight and pride. But, Queenie was a reluctant guest at Robert’s wedding. “I was a little shy of his wife’s family,” she says. “I didn’t know how they felt about colored people. If they’d like me coming.” Without misgivings, she felt it was her duty, no questions asked, to work for the young couple. “To get them started,” she says.

Queenie regards Mrs. Bergman as a sister, an older sister, and adopts many of her attitudes as a younger girl might. One summer Mr. Bergman rented a house in the country for himself, his wife, and his sons; Queenie went with them. Soon after their arrival Mrs. Bergman remarked to Queenie that she didn’t like her neighbors; they were too boisterous. A week later Mrs. Bergman suggested to Queenie that she make friends with some of the maids in the neighborhood, so her evenings would be less lonely. Queenie declined. “The girls up here,” she said, “are not my type.” When Mrs. Bergman feels ill Queenie often complains in an hour of the identical symptoms. But when Mrs Bergman takes to bed Queenie cares for her, and refuses to accept any extra money. “Are you trying to insult me? If your friends were doing it would they take it?” Queenie is intensely loyal to Mrs. Bergman and the family. At one time Mrs. Bergman told her that she couldn’t keep on paying her as much, and perhaps she ought to find a better position. “How much can you pay?” Queenie said. Mrs. Bergman named an exceedingly low figure. “That’s O. K.,” Queenie said. “I don’t want no one taking my job away.”

Queenie is self-assured in Mrs. Bergman’s house. If Mrs. Bergman rearranges the furniture, Queenie changes it back. “I’m set in my ways,” she says. When Mrs. Bergman’s friends phone Queenie speaks with them. “How are you?” she says. “How’s the family?” If Mrs. Bergman answers the phone Queenie shuts the water tap in the kitchen to listen. “She wants to know everything that goes on,” Mrs. Bergman says. And when her friends visit they always chat a few minutes in the kitchen with Queenie. “If they don’t,” Mrs. Bergman says, “Queenie resents it.” Once Mrs. Bergman was giving a dinner party for sixteen, and she felt tired. It was a lovely day and Robert suggested a drive in the country. Queenie urged her to go. “You’ll be back in time,” she said. They went driving, turned back late, and reached home only moments before the first guest. “Oh my God,” Queenie said. “Was I worried. But I was gonna entertain them. I was rehearsing what I’d say.” And yet, despite her aplomb, Queenie is an obsequious servant at dinner parties; and she won’t eat with white people. Once Mrs. Bergman said to her, “Sit down and have lunch with me.” But Queenie wouldn’t. On another occasion Mrs. Bergman went to supper at a neighbor’s; a friend phoned, and Queenie came to give her the message, and the hostess, who had liberal convictions, asked Queenie to stay for supper. “Queenie sat down,” Mrs. Bergman says, “had a mouthful, and almost choked. Then she said she wasn’t hungry, and left. Later, she told me she doesn’t like that to happen. It embarrasses her.”

_____________

 

On weekdays, at five o’clock, Queenie takes the subway home. She lives four blocks north of 125th Street, Harlem’s main stem. The street she lives on is littered, crowded1, noisy. A row of shabby five-story red brick tenements, with low gray stoops and black fire” escapes, dominates it. An empty lot, where a tenement once stood, is near the corner; the tenement burned to the ground six years ago, and the lot is now’ heavy with cinders, empty beer cans, and twisted pieces of rusty metal. Garbage lies in the gutter and a cat scavenges. The Oberdorfer Cut Rate All Night Drug Store is on one corner; Harvey’s (All Systems) Beauty Parlor and West’s Fixit Shop are in the middle of the block. Men loiter on the stoops of the tenements; they talk and smoke. Women watch the street from the windows. School children run and shout and skip rope. Queenie lives in one of the tenements. The entrance is dark; the hallways and staircase are narrow; a single uncovered light bulb illuminates each floor. “I’m one flight up,” Queenie says. “Not too many stairs to pull.” Her rear apartment is tiny, twenty-three feet by nine. This space is divided into bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom. A double bed and two chests are wedged into the bedroom; Queenie can’t open one chest without moving the bed. A sofa, two chairs, a table with a radio, and an incongruously ornamental china closet are in the living room; a blue rectangle with silver letters, “God Bless Our Home,” hangs above the sofa. Queenie cooks in the small kitchen, and eats on a bridge table, which she opens in the living room. The bathroom contains sink, toilet, and shower—no bath. An air shaft in the bedroom and a window in the kitchen ventilate the flat. Her rent is $28 a month. “I don’t like it much,” she says. “The rent’s too high, and the apartment’s too small. It used to be five rooms, but the landlord cut them up in ‘38. So he’d make more money. And the mice come. They annoy me sometimes. I get so mad; just when someone come in they start running across the living room. Let you know they’re here. I’d like to get into a housing project.”

Queenie eats at six. “I eat the ordinarily good food,” she says. “In fact I eat very good. I eat too much, I nibbles all day. You can see it.” For supper she eats vegetables, or fish, or poultry, but little meat. “I’m almost a vegetarian,” she says. “Like G. B. Shaw. That’s why he live so long.”

After supper Queenie listens to the radio. “Any story on the radio,” she says, “I know it.” And reads the Daily News or magazines she brings home from Mrs. Bergman’s: Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, House Beautiful. Twice a week she goes to a movie. “That’s my hobby,” she says. “Nice pictures. Family life or detective stories. No cowboy stuff.” On other weekday evenings her friends drop by. “On Sunday,” she says, “my friends can never catch me home. I pull six notes out of the door on Sunday. I get a kick out of that. It’s a nice feeling that they want to come.” Her friends are factory workers, hospital orderlies, elevator operators, housekeepers. “Steady working people,” she says. “Like me. I like nice, good people, but I don’t hate the bad. I try to figure why they’re bad. Must be a reason everyone’s not good.” Allan Stubbs, a tall, slim, quiet man, is one of Queenie’s best friends; he takes her to the movies. Queenie met Allan, who is a garage mechanic, at a card party four years ago. “Allan drinks a little,” Queenie says. “Not too much. And goes to church once in a while.” On Saturday night Queenie and Allan play cards, and on Sunday, after church, they go for a walk or a drive in his car. Allan gives Queenie little trouble—though one night he got drunk and tied up traffic at Lenox Avenue and 125th Street. Two policemen brought him to Queenie’s apartment “I opened the door,” she says, “and all I saw was buttons, with Allan between them. A white cop and a colored cop. They put Allan down, and the white cop started to leave. But not the colored cop. ‘You should hang out with a better class,’ he said. ‘Allan’s a garage mechanic,’ I said. ‘Maybe he got that way from the gasoline.’ But he wasn’t buying that, and he bawled me out.”

Sometimes, in her leisure, Queenie goes to a funeral or a revival meeting, or plays a number. Queenie has one girl friend, who periodically says to her, “Some big shot died, let’s go to the funeral.” Queenie accompanies her to be agreeable rather than to witness the spectacle. “My friend just craves for a funeral,” Queenie says. “I don’t go for that curiosity. She say, ‘Well, you have to die some day.’ I say, ‘I don’t know nothing about it.’” When Queenie goes to a funeral she refuses to look at the corpse. “I don’t like to look at the dead,” she says. “I like to remember them alive. If I look, I look on them forever. The memory never goes.” Until recently Queenie feared the dead. “I know you can’t move or harm me when you’re dead,” she says. “But I couldn’t get used to it. When I was little my mother bathed and clothed the dead; there was no undertaker. She’d leave me and my sister alone in the night. It was dark in the country, and we’d be scared; we’d huddle up together, and we wouldn’t sleep. I think that’s why I was afraid. Two years ago the husband of a friend of mine died—God bless the dead. I liked them very much. ‘Go and touch him,’ his wife said. ‘Then you won’t be scared.’ So I did. I felt his forehead and it was cold and stiff, my friend. But I wasn’t scared no more; I believed the sign.”

_____________

 

Queenie is more skeptical of revival meetings than of funerals. The two last summers a revivalist from Chicago has set up his tent in an empty lot near 125th Street, and once or twice Queenie has gone to hear him. “I don’t believe in them prophets,” she says. “The Bible warns against false prophets. Not tp be fooled or persuaded by them. They tell you they can heal the sick with prayers. But I don’t believe that. Nobody can be healed that way. Or they give you a money-blessing. You come up, touch the cross, and lay your money—$1 or $5—down. They take the money and anoint your head. Then, you’re gonna be lucky. A success in business. You’re gonna hit the number. Oh I hate to see that! It’s a racket; they oughta drive them out of town.”

At intervals Queenie plays a number. She bets a penny or a nickel on a three-digit number at a grocery or candy store in Harlem, or a numbers runner stops at her apartment. “Dream something last night?” he says. “Wanna bet on it?” Queenie won once; she put a nickel on 945, and won $30. “I almost had a heart attack,” she says. “It’s awful hard to win.” She says number-playing, like money-blessing, is a racket. “It’s all gangsters,” she says, “who ride around in fine cars. If one number’s played heavy they change it; if it’s 304 they make it 340. And if a person puts $1 or $2 on a number and wins, they don’t pay off. Fifty cents or under, they pay.” Still Queenie regards number-playing as a good way to supplement her income, if she’s lucky. “What do I have to lose for a nickel?” she says. “I don’t make it a habit. I wouldn’t put my earnings on it. It’s a little extry money, and colored people don’t make too much.”

_____________

 

As far back as Queenie knows, her people have been poor. Her great-grandparents were slaves. Her grandparents were small farmers. “Just plain people,” she says. “They didn’t do nothing much.” Queenie was born in 1905, near Lawrenceville, Virginia, a tiny, dusty farming community with a few frame houses, a Baptist church, a one-room schoolhouse, and three stores. Her parents were Elizabeth and Wylie Jones; she was baptized Queen Esther Jones, after the Biblical heroine, but everyone called her Queenie. Her mother was a quiet, generous, religious woman; her father was a heavy-set, easygoing man, a barber who worked in Suffolk, a town of 10,000 eighty miles from Lawrenceville, and came home every second weekend. “He didn’t want to be a little farmer,” Queenie says. “The little farmer is always in debt. Never gets anywhere.” Queenie, her younger sister Mary, and mother and father lived three miles from town, in a small house. “It wasn’t a log house,” she says. “The outside was boards. Inside was plastering.” The house stood on two acres; beyond them was an uncle’s farm of fifty acres, which grew corn, cotton, and tobacco. A narrow dirt road twisted past the Jones’s flower garden to the adjacent farm, where it rejoined a wider, longer dirt road that went to Lawrenceville.

Queenie was a plump, bright, helpful child. She enjoyed going to church and Bible reading; she liked to stay with the sick; she played dolls and tag with her four cousins, who lived next door. She started grade school when she was seven. The school, for Negro children alone, stood near the church in Lawrenceville, and went as far as the fourth grade. “First grade lasted till you learned something,” Queenie says. “I liked it I liked to learn, and I wanted to be smart.” She studied arithmetic, grammar, history, and spelling. “I liked spelling best,” she says. “I could learn that.” While still a tot she worked on neighboring farms at harvest time. White farmers with many acres would recruit workers for the harvest. Men and women would gather tobacco leaves, and children would tie the leaves together for drying; she earned thirty cents a day. “The white people lived a mile away,” she says. “We got along.” There would only be trouble when a chicken or hog was stolen from a white farmer. “The white people had more chickens and more hogs,” she says. “They had more of everything. Naturally. Well, late at night some colored people would go out and steal a chicken. Then they’d try to track down the thief. There’d be some fuss.”

After fourth grade Queenie went to a larger school in another town. Each morning she and half a dozen other kids rode to school in a neighbor’s Ford. “It was a big, tall building,” she says. ‘Three floors. A lot more kids and a nice green lawn with hedges.” In fifth and sixth grade, Queenie studied fractions—“I didn’t know too much about that”—and sewing; she was quite a good sewer, and once won first prize, a green and yellow ribbon, in a school contest. When she was twelve, and had finished the sixth grade, Queenie dropped out of school. “At that time,” she says, “you had to pay to go further. We weren’t able to pay.” From twelve to seventeen Queenie worked on Negro farms in and about Lawrenceville. “I helped the neighbors,” she says. “Cleaned and cooked. I wasn’t allowed to go to anybody’s house. I went to church people like my family. Poor people trying to make a living. We all belong to the same lodge, the Household Roof. When you got sick the lodge give you money, and when you died the lodge bury you.” As a farm helper, she earned fifty cents a day. ‘Those were my best days,” she says. “It wasn’t hard. I didn’t realize it then, but I was happy. It didn’t run across my mind that I’d have to work, or that I’d be in New York. I never had that idea.”

When Queenie was sixteen her father came home from Suffolk, too ill to work. For a year her mother struggled along and then, in 1922, Queenie went into service. “Wasn’t any money coming in,” she says. “I wanted to help.” A cousin who cooked for a family in Richmond wrote to offer Queenie her job; she herself was going North. Queenie asked her parents, and they said it was all right. So she left for Richmond one clear October day, getting up at five in the morning and packing three dresses, underclothes, and an extra pair of shoes in her father’s battered black suitcase. Her mother made her lunch: fried chicken, sweet potato pie, and biscuits; her father gave her his gold watch. “It was a fine watch,” Queenie says. “Pure gold. It had been handed down. It was older than I am now.” Her mother said to her: “Don’t go in bad places—like beer gardens—and don’t get in bad company.” Her father said: “You don’t have to worry about Queenie.” Then Queenie and her father left for the railroad station in Alberta, a nearby town of 400. “Some friends came in a car,” Queenie says. “I was excited to leave. I was scared and anxious. Wondering how I’d get along. What the family would be like? If I’d suit them? Whether I could do the work?”

Queenie already knew the small station in Alberta. On Sundays she and her friends often went there to watch the trains pass by. They would wave, and when a train stopped Queenie would speak to the passengers she knew. “They’d tell us about New York,” she says. “Coney Island, the nice clothes, the good wages. So we’d say, ‘some day, I’m gonna go up North, and see for myself.’” Now the train came, and Queenie with lunch and suitcase got aboard, waved goodbye to her father and her friends, and found a seat in the Negroes’ car.

_____________

 

Queenie worked in Richmond for the Ernest Bradfords. They were well-to-do and lived with two young daughters in a nine-room colonial house in a suburb. They had three servants: a cook, chambermaid, and butler, all Negroes. Queenie was the cook and she had a large room on the second floor. “I had a private bath,” she says. “Naturally, it was no compliment.” Queenie wore a uniform, a black dress with white apron and white cap, and cooked three meals daily, shined the silver—“They used a lot of silver,” she says. “Everything was silver”—set the table, and washed tablecloths and napkins. She was diligent, efficient, and loyal—for $8 a week. “I liked it good,” she says. “The work wasn’t hard, though they got service out of you. They didn’t do nothing for themselves.” The chambermaid cleaned, washed, and ironed; the butler answered doorbells and served dinner. “At night,” she says, “the butler would wash up, shine up, and slick back his hair. He’d put on his black pants and white jacket, and serve.” After dinner the three of them would do the dishes, and then eat.

Queenie worked six days a week. On Sunday she would go to church, and then to a movie, a dance, or a friend’s house; now and then, she would travel home for a day’s visit. The careful routine was shattered only once, when the butler quit. “He was bitter,” Queenie says. “Sour all day. He didn’t like the Bradfords. He thought they were mean to him because he was colored. He had to eat in the kitchen, and he had to bathe before serving dinner. ‘I don’t smell,’ he used to say.” One summer day, while mowing the lawn, he had an argument with Mrs. Bradford, asked for his money, and left. “He’ll come back,” Mrs. Bradford said. “He did,” Queenie says. “In September, and asked for his job. She was nice: she gave it to him, and he didn’t mention his bitterness no more.” Mrs. Bradford was friendly with Queenie. Soon after her arrival she informed Queenie, “I’m going to look after you.” She urged Queenie to get plenty of sleep and save her money. Sometimes she would ask Queenie about her family, and sometimes she would buy her a dress at a department store sale. Once Queenie had a toothache, and Mrs. Bradford took her to a Negro dentist. Mr. and Mrs. Bradford traveled frequently, and left Queenie to run the house. “When they went away,” she says, “it was an easy time. We’d ask our friends over and cook for ourselves.” Once the Bradfords returned unexpectedly, as Queenie, the maid, and the buder were about to eat a Southern Negro specialty—corn bread and beans. “It was a rare dish for us,” Queenie says. “Mr. Bradford came in the kitchen, and said, ‘Gee, that looks good.’ He took a soup plate with corn bread and beans, and sat right down to eat with us. We were so mad. We were just getting ready to enjoy ourselves.”

When Queenie was twenty-two, after five years in Richmond, she decided to migrate to New York. “I had heard about it,” she says. “I wanted to come.” She had an ambition. “I wanted to be a beautician,” she says. “Hair oiling, curling, and dressing. I wanted to make people beautiful. I think your hair is as important as your clothes. It’s an improvement for your face.” Queenie went to a Richmond employment agency that engaged girls for Northern employers.

“I want to go to New York,” she said. “Anybody want a girl?” She was hired to work in Brooklyn for Mrs. Henry Bergman. She traveled from Norfolk by steamboat, and arrived in New York in June 1927.

_____________

 

In Brooklyn Queenie took the place of Susanna Brown, who had worked ten years for Mrs. Bergman. Susanna, the widow of a Chinese seaman, had come from Trinidad. “She was old,” Mrs. Bergman says, “and she wanted to go home.” Queenie lived with the Bergmans in a seven-room apartment, as Susanna had. She cleaned, shopped, cooked, and helped care for Mrs. Bergman’s three sons. She took them to the park after school; on Saturday afternoons they went to the movies; and when the fleet was in they visited the battleships. Queenie liked the boys. “You love them,” she says, “when you take care of them every day and stay around them so long. They were like my own kids.” And she liked New York. “I had to get used to the hustle,” she says, “the excitement and bright lights. But it didn’t take me long. I didn’t miss the South. New York was better. And anytime you can better yourself, you should.”

Queenie met John Peters, a tall, handsome, good-natured man who worked as a porter in a nearby apartment house, and soon after, in 1930, they married. Queenie quit work, they moved to Harlem, and the next year, a daughter, Constance, was born. Then, John Peters began to drink heavily. “He’d get happy,” Queenie says, “and spend all his pay. He wasn’t cruel or brutal: he didn’t beat me. But he’d come home sloppy drunk. I talked seriously with him, but he didn’t stop. So I said, ‘Either you get out, or I get out.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you keep the place.’ And he got out.” That was in 1932. “I thought he might get over the drinking business if we separated.” Occasionally Queenie and he would meet; sometimes they would go to parties together but she wouldn’t let him take her home. “He might want to stay,” she says. Despite her hopes, he continued to drink, and finally she moved to a new address without telling him. She returned to work. “I worked four or five hours a day,” she says. “No more. I’d leave Connie with neighbors.” In 1934 she sent Constance South to live with an aunt; Queenie wanted to work full time, and she felt too that New York wasn’t a desirable place to raise her daughter. “I didn’t want to go to work with her on my mind,” she says. “I couldn’t tie her to the bedpost; kids need air. But in the streets they see and hear too much. They get wise. If it’s in the kids not to do it, they won’t. But some kids can be persuaded easy. ‘Ah, c’mon, your mother won’t know.’ I’m a little old-fashioned that way; I was brought up strict. I didn’t like being separated from her. But, I said I know it’s for the best.” Today her daughter is a pretty young woman of twenty, a student nurse in a Richmond hospital. “She looks like her father,” Queenie says. “He didn’t have a broad nose either.” Queenie sees her twice a year, when she goes home to visit at Easter and Christmas.

When Queenie decided to go back to work she looked for Mrs. Bergman at her old address. But she had moved, no one knew where. Then Queenie took jobs, which were scarce, as they came; she worked each day for a different housewife. “A girl would say to me, “Maybe you want to work in my place today.’ Once, I was full up for the whole week.” The women for whom she worked liked her and often recommended her to their friends. “And it went on and on,” she says. “I always found work. It was tough but I didn’t get on the breadline. I didn’t get on that relief.” And she didn’t have to frequent the’ slave market” in the Bronx, where maids stood dejectedly on street corners at 9 AM, awaiting housewives who would more or less bid for them. But once or twice she couldn’t pay her rent and had to hold a “house rent” party, the custom in Harlem during the depression. She would fry chicken, and mix drinks. “My friends would come,” she says, “and pay a lot for the food and drinks.” When one of her friends needed assistance Queenie would go to her house rent party. In 1936 her sister Mary, five years younger, came to live with her and paid half the rent; she too was separated from her husband. They lived together until 1945, when Mary moved to a furnished room in the Bronx. “I like to sleep with the light on,” Queenie says. “Mary doesn’t. She’d wake up and get mad. ‘Put out that light,’ she’d say. But I was too lazy to move. ‘Get up and put it out yourself,’ I’d say.

Queenie found a steady job in 1937. She went to clean and cook for an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Morris Samuels, who lived on West End Avenue. A year later Mrs. Samuels, who was seventy-two, died, but her husband, who refused to live with his children, kept the apartment. “They had twin beds,” Queenie says, “and he slept right there for two years. If I’d been him I’d have got rid of her bed. But he used to cry and talk about her a lot He had too many memories.” One day in 1940, while riding a crosstown bus, Queenie noticed a woman who looked familiar. “I went over,” she says, “and I touched her on the back. ‘Mrs. Bergman,’ I said. Well, we had such a reunion, everyone was amazed. Everyone stared and wondered what it was all about. Finally we calmed down. She said she’d been living in a hotel since ‘32, but now she had an apartment. She didn’t have a girl, and she wanted me.” Thereafter, for six months, Queenie worked mornings for Mrs. Bergman and afternoons for Mr. Samuels. Then one weekend Mr. Samuels fell sick with pneumonia, and died in three days. Queenie went to work full time for Mrs. Bergman. That was ten years ago. “I’m lucky,” Queenie says now. “I’m lucky in health and strength; knock on wood, I never miss a day. I’m lucky I always make enough to depend on myself. And I’m lucky with people liking me; if I don’t see my friends in a week they come around.”

_____________

 

Twenty years ago Queenie relinquished her first ambition—to be a beautician; her husband had objected. But she acquired another one. “My next ambition,” she says, “was to open a restaurant. A small, regular restaurant. I would’ve cooked and made it good so I would’ve had a big trade. But it cost too much, $3,000 or $4,000.” Now, she wants to work and save for her old age. I’m getting old,” she says. ‘Tor a long time I didn’t accept getting old. When I was younger I’d think about old people. Old people who didn’t have too much, who had to be always on the go, go, go. I’d see a lady with gray hair on the bus in the morning and I’d say that if she was my mother I’d work day and night so she wouldn’t have to. Now I don’t think so much.” She intends to work as long as she can. “I’m gonna save up all I can,” she says. “I have quite a few years until I get really old and can’t work.” When Richard marries she wants to clean, iron, and cook for him. “1 got Robert started,” she says. “I have to get Dick started.”

Queenie owns a little place in the South, the house and two acres where she was born—her father left it to her—and to which she could retire if she wished. But she doesn’t intend to return home; she likes the North. “I wouldn’t go back,” she says. “All that’s out of my mind. I couldn’t get used to it.” Some time ago a friend drove her down to Richmond in a large, shiny new car. “As we drove through,” she says, “the colored people came out to look at us. We were the rich Negroes from the North. I felt sorry for how they dressed and lived down South. In Harlem I don’t live well either. But I dress better; I keep up my looks.” She actually dislikes Harlem. “The way some colored people go,” she says, “and dress and are so rough. They come up North and treatment is better. They figure they’re smart, and get in bad. But sooner or later all the bad people will vacate. Those fiery Puerto Ricans, who’d just as soon take a knife and cut your head off. Those West Indians, who make plenty of money, and live in one room, on fish heads. Save all their money to open a store. We wouldn’t live that way.” Queenie says that Harlem is comparatively safe for white people at night. “You want to go and visit a friend?” she says. “Perfectly safe. You hear a lot, and a lot happens. But, they don’t pick on every white person. Mind your own business and don’t go in the night clubs and get drunk and try to mix. They leave you alone.”

Queenie would like to get an apartment in a Harlem housing project. She enjoys walking past those that are already up, and speculating. “When Allan and me takes a walk,” she says, “I say, “let’s go and look at the nice houses.’ At night the lights are on, and it looks so good. Oh my God, I wish I lived in there! It looks so quiet. No rats. No P. D.’s [Police Department officers] running through. I’d like a three-room apartment with a real living room. My rent would be the same, wouldn’t it? I wouldn’t want to pay over $30 a month. I don’t believe in paying out all my money in rent. But I wouldn’t mind waiting. I got a lot of patience and I wouldn’t mind waiting for something good.”

_____________

 

+ A A -
You may also like
Share via
Copy link