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What You Owe Me, Chapter One
WHAT YOU OWE ME
Chapter One I was looking at myself in a tarnished mirror taped to a crooked wall. I leaned my head left of the crack that split the glass and squinted my eyes to get a better view. Made me dizzy. My shift was about to start, and I was rushing to put on lipstick. The light in the room was so dim I could barely make out my mouth. The shade was too pale, but I made do and blotted on a piece of toilet paper. The door opened just as I was imagining my face with thinner lips. I turned around, and that's when I saw her, not big as a banty hen. Mr. Weinstock was right behind. "Hosanna," he said to me, "this is Gilda Rosenstein, and she'll be working with you. I want you to train her."
There were five of us women cleaning at the Braddock Hotel, all colored. It was right after Labor Day, and we'd finished having our get-started cup of coffee (as compared to our keep-going cup in the afternoon and our hold-on cup toward the end of our day) in a small dark room in the basement. The manager called it the Maids' Room because we were the only ones who used it. We called it Our Room; we did everything in there: change our clothes; drink coffee; eat lunch; smoke cigarettes; steal a quick nap or a drink. Every once in a while somebody would sneak in a man. It was a gray room with peeling paint and furniture that looked as though it needed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Our lifeline was a little secondhand phonograph and a few old seventy-eights. Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, and Louis Jordan resurrected us around the clock. It's been more than fifty years, and I'll bet that all of us, the living and the dead, can recall just what we were doing when we looked at Gilda dressed in that uniform. It wasn't every day we saw a white woman wearing what we wore, doing what we did. Gilda was the first, and I remember her in this life I'm living and the one I left behind.
Death isn't like I thought it would be. The Baptist church stamped me early, and I was halfway expecting pearly gates, winged angels playing on their harps, St. Peter at the door, the works. Turned out that heaven ain't nothing but a space in my mind, no more permanent than a sunshiny day; I go in and out. The background music is whatever song I'm humming. Me, I'm partial to Tina Turner. White's not the only color people wear. Heaven is a great big be-in, where everybody comes as they are. Pajamas. Wild-looking hair. Mink coats. No makeup. Blond wigs. The be-in is right inside you. I think of it as the Land of Calm, a place to reflect, without alarms going off, telling me it's time to do this or that. The only thing that moves me here is spirit.
I'm in heaven now observing my baby girl, Matriece. I say baby, but my child is thirty-eight years old. She can't see me hovering in her bathroom, watching her comb her hair and get ready to go to work. She smiles at herself in the mirror as she gives her hair a final pat. The smile is the good part. My child liking what she sees reflected back at her is the good part. I fought for that, not just for her and her big sister, Vonette, but for all the sisters with hair that didn't ride their shoulders, with flaring nostrils that welcomed air, and lips that came with a pucker. I helped convince them that they were beautiful, unchained their minds every bit as much as Malcolm X did. Now a pretty black girl can do a Mona Lisa on a billboard and sell America a beer or a lawn mower. Pick up a magazine, and there we are, smiling our cover girl smiles. Wasn't always that way. "Because we're already beautiful"—that was my motto back in the fifties when all colored women had were Red Fox stockings and face powder so light it made us disappear. All right, maybe I shouldn't compare myself with Malcolm X, but I made a contribution. I saw a need, and I filled it. I got rewards for that while I was on earth, but somebody owes me still. I'm not talking about a debt of gratitude; I'm talking about money.
Matriece will make things right. She's the steady one. Vonette is hardheaded, always was, always will be. Fifty million hair care products for black women, and she decides not to comb hers at all. Dreadlocks. That's just to make me turn over in my grave, so to speak. Vonette and I had issues while I was alive, and we still do. But my Matriece . . . She wants what I went to my grave wanting: retribution. And she's the only one who can get it for me.
She applies her lipstick last, after her hair is right and her clothes are on. Makeup ain't nothing but a promise: Use me and I'll get you your man, your romance, your passion, whatever you want. Put me under your eyes, and I'll take away the circles, all the pain, and everything will be new. The name is more important than the purpose. That's Red Drama on her mouth.
Me watching Matriece is heaven, but I can't stop my mind from shifting. I'm not the first one to go to her grave with nothing to leave behind but a fierce yearning. Bits of my life still float by, just like when I was dying. I shine the light on all the faces, all the memories that are with me in my sojourn. This is essential: not to drift or soften, never to forgive or give up. If I find my anger waning I can always renew it just by remembering.
None of the maids at Braddock had ever worked with a white person before. Work for them, now that's a different story. It was soon after the war, 1948, and the five of us had put Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana behind us. We'd all caught that long gray dog out to Los Angeles looking for better times, plus a man. Kissing frogs and scrubbing floors-that was our lives. We traded fields for toilets, dirt under our nails for ammonia on our hands. Still had to say yessir, yes ma'am. Still had to live all together like lepers on roped-off acres that other people fled from as soon as they saw us coming. Watts—a sprawled-out piece of land with tiny bungalows lined up on the widest streets I'd ever seen—that's what we claimed. Come Monday, we caught the first bus. Number 86 ran from Central straight up Crenshaw; the 72 came down Wilshire. Cruising past palm trees, I took in those skinny trunks as if they were men coming to court me. My eyes traveled slowly from the ground all the way to the top and then back down again to see if I'd missed any flaws, any beauty.
When Mr. Weinstock left the room nobody said anything for a long time. Hattie, the oldest in the group, rolled her eyes. I knew how she felt. One way or another, straight through or around the bend, most of the hard times in our lives had come from white folks. The other women—Winnie, Opal and Fern—looked at me like I was the one who should decide how we'd treat her.
All right then. I smiled, stuck out my hand, and she shook it. She was a washed-out little thing and real thin. Next to her I felt blown up and lit in neon, not that I was so big. I was average height and weight, not much up top, but I always had some hips on me. Her skin was so white I could see clear to her veins, almost to her heart. My skin was the color of pecans; nothing showed through. Frizzy brown hair touched her shoulders. I had thick rough hair that took a press and curl every two weeks. Gilda looked worn out; I had a baby face. Her teeth were brown, too, as though she hadn't brushed them in a long time. People used to always tell me I had pretty teeth, because they were big and white, so I guess that's why I noticed other people's smiles.
Gilda smelled like roses and didn't smile, but I managed to see that she needed to get to a dentist. She didn't speak much English—yes, no, please, say it again—and that caught my attention. The white folks I was used to were homegrown rattlers that damaged as they slithered. The thing that got me, got all of us I guess, was that she didn't seem to know that it was unusual for her to be working with us. She seemed unconscious with her eyes open, as though she had sleepwalked her way into Our Room. I believe if I'd poured ice-cold water on her she wouldn't have made a sound.
I could tell straight off that she wasn't used to cleaning up behind people. That's to say: She wasn't poor white trash. I came out of Inez, Texas, where PWT is a crop that doesn't need fertilizer; I knew it when I saw it. There was plenty of trash walking around Los Angeles, jug-eared, stringy-haired men and women out of Oklahoma and Dust Bowl territory, dandelions blown west during the Depression, trying to make a new start with only fourth-grade educations and their color to recommend them. Gilda was an orchid that somebody's boot had crushed.
She didn't seem to mind the job, even though that first day I had to tell her everything at least twice. When she did try to say a few things, I heard the accent, thick as sorghum, and I realized she didn't understand what I was saying. So, I slowed down.
The first month Gilda was really quiet. She did her work, drank her coffee, ate her lunch, and didn't talk to anybody other than me. "Hosanna, what is this? Hosanna, what I do?" All day long.
We were in Our Room not long after she came, and Sarah Vaughan was crooning on the record player. Gilda sat listening, as though she were trying to memorize a bird before it flew away. When the song finished, she turned to me; she was trembling, and there were tears in her eyes. "The music is so . . . It is medicine," she said.
—From What You Owe Me by Bebe Moore Campbell. (c) August 2001, G. P. Putnam's Sons, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.
