Babylon Sisters Read online

  Ezola’s inclusion of a well-woman clinic on-site had garnered a flurry of news coverage, all well deserved. The jobs she was filling rarely included health benefits, although healthy employees are always better for business. So Ezola hired two women doctors, and gave any woman she placed access to the clinic as long as she was employed. She hadn’t been generous enough to spring for hospitalization or maternity benefits, but she was definitely on the right track. The lobby floors were spotless, and the plants were so green I couldn’t believe they were real until I got closer and saw a young woman watering and pruning nearby. It was an impressive setup, and it seemed to be humming right along just fine. What could they possibly want with me?

  Before I had a chance to speculate further, the elevator’s mirrored doors opened and a short, bald man in a beautiful pin-striped suit was standing there smiling like he was so happy to see me, he could barely contain the joy.

  “Ms. Sanderson,” he said, coming forward and holding out his hand in greeting. “It is a pleasure. I’m Sam Hall.”

  The voice was the one I had heard on the phone, all right, but none of my mental speculation had led me to picture Sam as a short, slightly round, clean-shaven guy with a very expensive suit and a very firm handshake.

  “Welcome to Mandeville Maid Services,” he said. “You just passed your first test.”

  “And what test was that?”

  “You arrived on time,” he said. “You’d be amazed at how many people are careless about it. Five minutes here. Ten minutes there. It adds up, and that’s not how we do business.”

  This woman must be a real terror.

  “The renovation is lovely,” I said.

  “Thank you. Now will you follow me? Miss Mandeville is really looking forward to talking with you.”

  He led me down a short, heavily carpeted hallway that ended at two oversize oak doors. He knocked softly, and a buzzer deactivated the lock with a click. Her level of security surprised me, but I guess it shouldn’t have. These are dangerous times. Sam pushed open one of the big doors and moved aside to let me pass.

  I stepped into a large, very formal-looking room that had an imposing cherrywood desk at one end, and at the other a dining table elaborately set for two that could easily seat six. In between was an area made for more casual conversation, with two love seats facing each other, a couple of wing-back chairs, and an oversize throne-looking thing that was sprayed antique gold and upholstered with tufted red velvet. It looked like a child’s idea of a chair fit for a queen, and Ezola Mandeville was sitting in it as I stepped into her office.

  She stood up and smiled pleasantly, although she didn’t come forward to greet us. Sam closed the door and walked with me over to where she was standing. She looked as intimidating as her photographs. Maybe more so. Fierce might be a better word to describe her. She probably wasn’t much taller than I was, but it wasn’t about height. There was a real presence, an almost palpable strength, rolling off her in waves. I couldn’t imagine trying to tell her no.

  As she stood there majestically, in front of her unapologetic throne, I was aware of her strong arms and hands that ended in short, thick fingers and nails shaped square for efficiency, not fashion. She was rangy, but not thin. Her broad, dark brown face was clean of makeup and dominated by her small but expressive eyes and high, sharp cheekbones. Her mouth was full-lipped and firm, and her hair was twisted into a bun, pinned tightly at the back of her head. A plain dark blue linen dress with a single strand of pearls and a pair of low-heeled pumps completed her outfit by doing nothing to draw attention to themselves. When you saw Ezola Mandeville, you remembered her, not her clothes.

  “Miss Mandeville,” Sam said. “I would like to present Ms. Catherine Sanderson.”

  “Thank you for coming,” Ezola said, shaking my hand with a grip as firm as Sam’s, although her voice was surprisingly light, almost girlish. Neither one of them looked at all the way they sounded. It was like meeting a popular radio deejay and realizing that he was a lot closer in appearance to Biz Markie than Wesley Snipes.

  “It’s an honor to meet you,” I said. “I’m a great admirer of your work.”

  “I’m so happy to hear it. That’ll make my job that much easier. Please sit down.” She indicated the chair closest to the throne and I took it. It wasn’t until I sat down that I realized how much lower my chair was than Ezola’s. She was giving Sam instructions in the crisp way of someone who is used to saying things one time and one time only. Sam was watching her and nodding attentively. I decided he wasn’t really unattractive. It was just that, based strictly on his voice, I had been expecting someone else. In my mind, Sam Hall was a cross between Denzel Washington and Sam Jackson. When he turned out not to be anything like either one of them, I felt like he had cheated.

  He assured Ezola that he would communicate her wishes to the kitchen and then turned back to me.

  “So good to have you here, Ms. Sanderson,” he said, extending his hand. “I look forward to seeing you again.”

  I had assumed he would be staying for the meeting, but he was gone before I had a chance to say good-bye, pulling the big door closed behind him.

  Ezola Mandeville turned to me in my little sawed-off chair with a question.

  “You eat meat, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, wondering if that was another test.

  “Good, good.” She lowered herself onto her throne as she nodded her approval. I guess I passed again. “I’ve had some people up here recently who acted like I was putting their lives in danger by serving up a nice porterhouse steak. Asked me hadn’t I heard about mad cow disease!”

  She rolled her eyes in disgust. “What kind of question is that? Of course I know about mad cow disease. I remember when Oprah got tried for even talking about mad cow disease. But what does that have to do with a nice lunch of steak and potatoes? Nothing!”

  I had to agree with her on that one. Mad cow disease was so far down on my worry list that I rarely considered it at all. When I want to freak myself out about an illness, I just look at the AIDS statistics and that’s enough for me. But this woman didn’t invite me up here to talk about cows. We were here to talk turkey.

  “Here’s the way I like to do business,” she said. “We talk first, and eat after. That way we can both enjoy the meal without trying to figure out what the other one’s thinking. I’m a busy woman and I know you are, too. We could waste a lot of time trying to be mind readers.”

  “That sounds good to me,” I said. “Sam didn’t really tell me very much when we talked on the phone.”

  She smiled and nodded, as though that were as it should be. “He’s very high on you. I need to be able to tap into the community of women you know like the back of your hand, and Sam says you can make that happen.”

  “I’m flattered,” I said.

  “Don’t be,” she said. “I want to help women stand on their own two feet, Miss Sanderson, but I’m not in the missionary business. I intend to make a profit and I intend to make this business grow, but there’s one thing standing in my way. Do you know what that something is?”

  I shook my head.

  “Sorry black bitches,” she said as easily as she might have said, Would you care for a cup of tea?

  “Excuse me?”

  “Let me tell you what I mean. I’m in the maid business. If you don’t want to clean it up, I can send you a woman who will. It’s hard work, but it’s steady, there’s no shame in it, and it pays enough to keep a roof over your head and clothes on your back, but I got more jobs than I can fill. Why? Because no black woman wants to be a maid anymore. Nobody wants to clean up after everybody’s gone home or change a hundred beds a day or scrub the toilets out. These girls will do it for a week, a month, maybe three months, if they really need the money, and then they disappear. They don’t quit. They don’t call in. They just don’t show up one day, so the job gets half-done or not done at all. Then the white man who hired me to get it done right calls to say he’s not pay
ing for the mess he got and what am I going to do about it?”

  I understood exactly what she was talking about, but her characterization of these women as sorry black bitches, however shaky their work habits might be, didn’t sit well with me, and I couldn’t let it stand.

  “I don’t think calling them bitches helps the situation.”

  “It doesn’t,” she said. “Nothing does. I’ve tried everything. They think they’re too good for this work. That’s why I call them sorry. They don’t see the value of an honest living.”

  “Why do you call them bitches?”

  She let the question sit there for a minute. “To see if you’re paying attention,” she said finally. “And to see whether or not you’d agree with me.”

  “I always pay attention,” I said, “and I never call women bitches. I don’t care how sorry they are.”

  She just looked at me and I looked right back. I wasn’t working for her yet so I had nothing to lose.

  “Good,” she said. “I don’t either. I hate that word.”

  She got up slowly and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window that let her gaze out at her employees going about their assignments. She turned back to me. “Can I tell you a story?”

  “Certainly,” I said, wondering how many more tests I’d have to pass before she fed me.

  “Most people,” Ezola said slowly, “have heard the story of how I once got fired for organizing maids.”

  I nodded.

  “What they haven’t heard is why I started doing it.”

  All the stories focused on shorter hours, higher pay, more humane treatment. Classic labor-movement goals. Seemed pretty clear to me.

  “I don’t mean the obvious reasons.” In spite of her earlier statement about not having time to read my mind, Ezola was doing a pretty good job of it. “I mean why would I, a poor, colored woman working as a Buckhead maid, suddenly think about doing something like that? What made me do it?”

  The history of black female activism is littered with tired feet, sore backs, one too many demands from the mistress or master of the house, one too many off days canceled at the last minute, one too many boxes of old clothes instead of a raise in pay.

  “It was a book,” she said, and her tone was almost reverent. “One book that changed everything for me. And do you know what book that was?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine.

  “It was Native Son by Richard Wright.”

  My surprise was total. Wright’s tragic novel from 1940 chronicles the fate of Bigger Thomas, a hapless black kid born into the most wretched poverty who accidentally smothers the drunken daughter of his wealthy white employers and then, in a panic, burns her body in the furnace. His arrest and conviction become a cause cél'ebre, galvanizing or polarizing the book’s white characters, depending on their political persuasions.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, honestly confused by what she had found in the grim pages of the novel that sparked her own activism.

  “You’ve read the book?”

  I nodded. “In college.”

  “You remember it?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “Well enough to answer a question for me?”

  Ezola needed to change her name to SAT.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said. “It’s been a while.”

  “It’s an easy question,” she said. “Why did Bigger kill that woman?”

  If you remember the book at all, you remember that. “He was afraid of being discovered in a white girl’s bedroom,” I said, trying to remember the character’s name.

  “Mary,” said Ezola, still effortlessly reading my mind.

  “Yes, Mary. She was drunk and he had carried her upstairs. . . .”

  The scene came back to me, piece by piece. Mary’s drunken staggering. Bigger’s rising panic.

  “He was afraid of being discovered.”

  “But why did you assume I was talking about Mary?”

  Slowly, another scene swirled out of my memory, but dimly. Not nearly as clear as Mary’s death scene. There was a woman in this one, too, but who was she? What was her name?

  “There was another woman,” I said, wishing I could call up more details, but try as I might, she remained a mystery.

  “Bessie,” Ezola said softly. “That other woman’s name was Bessie, and she was a colored woman, just like us, who helped Bigger out of the goodness of her heart and got bashed in the head for her trouble.”

  Now I remembered. After he killed Bessie for no reason except misdirected rage, the hero added insult to injury by stuffing her body down an air shaft, rendering her invisible. Ezola’s point was beginning to dawn on me.

  “That white woman I worked for had that book in her library for some reason. Maybe one of her kids brought it home from college. I don’t know. She didn’t have any other black books I ever saw, but she had that one, and one day it was out on the table, and before I dusted it off and put it back up where it belonged, I opened it up and read a little of the first page. I had never read a book written by a Negro before. I knew there were some, but I quit school after the tenth grade, so I never actually saw one. But that Native Son book just grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go. I sat right there all afternoon and read almost that whole book. When it was time to go, I put it in my purse and I read it all the way home on the bus, ate my dinner, and kept reading until I was done.

  “That next morning, I couldn’t get Bigger and Bessie out of my head. I understood about Mary, him being so scared and all, but why had he killed Bessie? I took the book back, and after I gave her breakfast, I asked Mrs. Wyndom, that was her name, if she’d read it. She said she had, and I said then maybe she could help me understand why Bigger killed that woman. She always liked to think she was helping me improve my mind, so she gave me this long explanation about how dangerous it would be for a black man to be in Mary’s bedroom like I didn’t know that, and on and on until I realized she wasn’t thinking about Bessie at all. That poor colored woman never crossed Mrs. Wyndom’s mind.”

  I was fascinated with Ezola’s line of reasoning and sorry that my first reaction had been the same as the clueless Buckhead matron’s. It reminded me of traveling with my parents to one small Caribbean island or another when I was just a kid, newly alive with a passion to right the world’s wrongs and full of a reformer’s zeal. I was amazed and ashamed at how they could ignore the poor people who were always around the fringes of the tourist zones we frequented, looking for a chance to sell you something, or begging a few coins. Even the people who were working at the hotels were invisible to my mother and father as they dressed in their beautiful clothes, kissed me good night after telling the babysitter what time to put me to bed, and swept out to the gangster-owned casinos for a night of high-stakes gambling that would probably have financed the babysitter’s family for a year or two.

  It made me feel guilty that we had so much while other people had so little, and one night, as my father was putting on his white dinner jacket, I asked him if it didn’t make him feel bad to ignore them.

  “They’re not my responsibility,” he said, shrugging them off like a cheap suit, “and they’re certainly not yours. Why don’t you go down to the pool and leave the people’s revolution to the people?”

  After that, I stayed home in Atlanta when they traveled outside the country. Neither one of them pressed me for the real reason why. I think they were relieved not to have to drag me along, trailing my privileged American guilt behind me like a whiff of Jungle Gardenia.

  “That white woman didn’t see me or Bessie,” Ezola was saying, “and it made me mad, and the more I thought about it, the madder I got. No wonder these women worked their maids so hard. They never even saw us. By the time I got off work that day and walked that long, uphill stretch from Mrs. Wyndom’s house to the bus stop, I had decided one thing. I wasn’t going to be invisible anymore. I was a full-grown woman and I figured it was time to start acting like one. I owed it to myself, and I o
wed it to Bessie.”

  She came back and sat down across from me again. I’m sure she told that story a lot, but it moved me. I forgave her for the black bitches test question and waited for her to wrap it up.

  “And that,” she said, “is what all this is about. Bearing witness for Bessie by looking out for all the hardworking colored women people never even see. That’s why I do what I do, and if you decide to come and work for me, that’s what you’ll be doing, too.”

  It was easily the most intense job interview I’d ever had, if that’s what this was, and it was impossible to resist. My work was already about saving women. Of course I wanted to bear witness for Bessie. I was already doing it for Maria and Ashima and Migdalia and Shanequa. It was the same testimony, and I had already been sworn.

  “But that’s what you’re already doing, isn’t it?” she said, watching me closely. She was good at this and she knew it. Now she was ready to close the deal.

  “Yes, I guess it is,” I said. “What can I do to help you?”

  As if on cue, there was a soft tap at the door. Ezola pushed the buzzer to admit a white-jacketed waiter bringing our food in covered silver dishes like room service.

  “Now that,” she said, standing up and waving him in to set things up, “we can talk about over lunch.”

  Which was exactly what we did.

  9