A black and white Polaroid, circa 1964. A gaggle of young white boys stand at one end of a kitchen table, fourth-wall style. The youngest is a toddler in a high chair. The eldest is perhaps 8 or 9, with a gap-toothed smile borne of his assurance that he rules this particular roost. A birthday cake commands the foreground, its candles alight.
The kitchen lights are turned off, for the spectacle of the candles. The flickering flames overwhelm the camera’s automatic exposure sensor in the darkened room, forcing all else into shadows. The shining, happy boys in the foreground are overexposed against the inky background. Looking more carefully reveals a figure in the darkness behind the boys, a specter from out of the noir, a young woman whose skin tone blends into the caliginous margins of the room.
My father kept a family photo album with hundreds of pictures from our childhood, but this is the only photograph with Annie, the black maid who lived with us for three years.
* * *
We were not the wealthy people one usually associates with having live-in help. We were strictly middle-class, living in a middle-class neighborhood, in the middle-class white enclave of East Meadow, Long Island. But incongruously we had a black maid living in our basement. This happenstance came about because grandpa Abe came to the house one day to find his pregnant daughter-in-law scrubbing the kitchen floor.
Abe Gold came from modest beginnings. His father, Davies, was an artillery officer in Czar Nicholas II’s army. He was kicked out of the military for the temerity of being Jewish at a time when being Jewish was an increasingly unpopular thing to be across all of Europe. The rioting, burning, looting, and raping of Jewish towns in the pogroms of late 19th century Russia sent the Gold family aflight for a safer haven. Delivered via steerage-class on a steamship out of England, they arrived in fin de siècle Manhattan to the grandeur of a two-room, cold-water flat on the Lower East Side. The six children shared a single bed, with the cacophony of push-cart merchants, horse-drawn drayage, and the multilingual babble of white immigrant New York a constant din below their window.
Abe grew to be a young man with natural skills as a carpenter. He became engaged during the Roaring Twenties to a telephone operator named Ruth from Kew Gardens. Ruth loaned Abe $400 to start Queens Flooring Company. They married, and Abe provided a decent living for them by installing and repairing hardwood floors throughout Brooklyn and Queens. They bought a house in Richmond Hill, not too far from Ruth’s parents, and soon had two boys.
Abe suspended his company during World War II to work for a defense contractor. By the late 1940s his re-started company had a handful of employees and they were installing much of the oak flooring in the ticky-tacky houses of America’s first modern suburb, Levittown, Long Island. These tract homes were meant to help alleviate the housing shortage for the millions of soldiers returning from war, and were available for sale only to veterans—that is, white veterans. By the mid-1950s, Abe’s two boys had come to work for him, gotten married, and moved out to Long Island themselves.
In the 60 years between getting chased out of Mother Russia by violent mobs of anti-Semitic Cossacks, and achieving a comfortable life on Long Island as a successful burgher and full-blown member of the bourgeoisie, Abe acquired a clutch-my-pearls noblesse that belied his scrappy immigrant origins on the Lower East Side. Seeing the mother of his only grandchild—now pregnant with his second grandchild—scrubbing a kitchen floor on her hands-and-knees disturbed Abe enough to give his son a raise so they could afford to hire a maid.
* * *
We had a succession of daytime maids—all of them black—in the late 1950s, as our mom bore three boys from 1956 to 1959. The maids came through a county employment agency in Hempstead, which is one of the few hamlets on Long Island that wasn’t strictly redlined—everyone knew that Hempstead was where we kept the black people in central Nassau County[1]. A maid would arrive each weekday morning, usually by bus, and was responsible for keeping the house clean, while mom tended to the cooking and us boys. The maids came at a cost of a dollar an hour, the minimum wage at the time, the equivalent of $9.31 in 2020.
This situation changed in 1961 when mom became pregnant with her fourth child. Exhausted from wrangling three rambunctious boys under the age of 6, my parents decided they needed live-in help.
The first of these was Malvina. A few weeks into her residency in our home, she was left to babysit the three of us one Saturday night so mom and dad could have an evening out. As Malvina later told them, she’d heard a suspicious noise outside, grabbed my mother’s good chef knife, and went out to investigate. Malvina was sent packing the next day.
What followed over the next few months was a series of black maids who Did Not Live Up To Mother’s Standards for one reason or another, but which mostly have their roots in casual racism. Finally, in desperation, with a child burgeoning ever closer to its birthdate, mom placed a call to her cousin Frieda in South Carolina to ask for her help in finding someone. “Send me someone honest,” my mother begged of Frieda. The choice of the word ‘honest’ unpacks itself in this context.
Cousin Frieda lived in the town of Latta, where her family owned Kornbluth’s Department Store, selling mostly clothes, some furniture, small appliances, and housewares. Latta was a town of just under two-thousand people at the time. It made national news in 2016 when the mayor had Police Chief Crystal Moore fired for being openly lesbian. One doesn’t have to wonder much how the town of Latta treated people in the 1960s who were openly black.
It’s hard to fathom the audaciousness of a white woman making a phone call to someone in the Deep South to order up a bespoke black maid, as casually as one might order a custom settee from a Carolina furniture shop. Apparently the procurement of southern black maids was a service Cousin Frieda had provided for mom’s older sisters as well, a decade or more earlier. It feels so cringey, looking in 2020’s rearview mirror, but the benefits and detriments of this overground railroad are questions we can only guess at for the young women who made this journey.
Annie, a girl of nineteen or twenty, may have worked for Kornbluth’s, or was otherwise already known to Cousin Frieda—it’s easy to imagine how most everyone knew everyone else in a town that was smaller than my high school by a thousand people. The means and conversation by which Cousin Frieda convinced Annie to leave Latta, South Carolina is unknown. Perhaps it was enticing and exotic to Annie. Perhaps jobs were hard to come by in the small village. Maybe she espied escape from the unrelenting grind of Jim Crow. Whatever the impetus, young Annie packed up her scant belongings in a single suitcase and was put on a train to New York, with my parents having paid her fare.
That’s how Annie—a young black women whose forebears had arrived five or ten generations earlier, by way of all the horrors of the Middle Passage and beyond—came to work as a live-in maid for a white, Jewish, middle-class family in America, who had been here but for a single generation.
* * *
Annie lived with us for almost three years, doing our house cleaning, clothes washing, and occasional babysitting. I have one vivid memory of her, when there was an incident a couple of years into her tenure. I was four-years-old, and had spent the morning helping mom make cookies. I was having some of them at the kitchen table while Annie cleaned up after us. Suddenly the milk-glass mixing bowl from the Mixmaster slipped from Annie’s soapy hands, shattering in the sink and spraying some shrapnel to the floor. Not trusting either of us to be safe from the shards, mom brusquely ordered Annie and me to go sit at the top of the basement stairs while she cleaned up the broken glass.
As we obediently sat at the top step, I noticed Annie’s hands were still wet from dish washing. I don’t know why, but for some reason I reached out to hold her damp hand. Maybe it was because we had both just been well-meaningly yelled at by my mom.
I remember Annie’s hand, how rough it was. Even through the dampness I remember feeling callouses on her fingers, callouses earned from doing housework for our family.
But then—
But then I noticed the color of her hands for the very first time. And then I looked at her face. Something clicked in my four-year-old brain. Annie was … different. I didn’t understand this difference. Why was she different? Because the world and its constructs had not yet been imprinted on my young psyche, I did what four-year-olds do—I asked the question.
“Why is your skin dark?”
She smiled at me, as only one can at a child who cannot possibly comprehend how badly we have fucked up this world.
“The sun made me this way,” she assured me in her Carolina drawl, “I spent too much time in the sun when I was a little girl.”
And being four, I accepted that answer.
* * *
Annie’s service to our family came to an embarrassingly bourgeois end when my father bought a little red speedboat in 1964. We could not, he decided, afford both a maid and a boat; and a boat, is what he wanted. Each week, Annie had been paid $25 cash, plus room and board, for five-and-a-half days of work. She would sometimes take the train to Brooklyn on her day off to visit with a man she knew, we know not from where. When she moved out, Annie had left behind some of her clothes and a few possessions. She returned some months later to retrieve them, with a man in tow. She introduced him as her husband, and that’s the last we know of Annie’s life after serving as our live-in maid for three years.
I won’t ever know why Annie felt compelled to answer me the way she had that day at the top of the stairs. Maybe she was well-read and was slyly alluding to the Langston Hughes’ poem, or perhaps she knew of Lorraine Hansberrry’s Raisin in the Sun. I’ve always wished, once I knew better, that she’d responded differently. “There are black people in this world, little man,” she might have said to me, “it’s time enough you know that, and what’s been done to us—is still being done to us—because of it.”
There were plenty of good reasons in 1964 for her to not tell
me that simple truth, all of them hinging on zeitgeist and racism. Whatever her
thinking was, Annie choose to not edify a little white boy that day, a little
white boy who had never before noticed any difference in people until that very
moment.
I regret that we do not know how Annie fared for her time with us, or her time after. Our family knew nothing of Annie’s inner life, or her experience, or her dreams, and that is a sort of crime against someone who devoted three years of her life to us for meager recompense. We are left only a memory, and a photo with her standing in the background of our family. All that remains for us is to hope that Annie went on to have a good life that was full and happy, with many photographs of herself standing in the foreground.
friends have been by to visit