Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens

Domestic Workers in the South,1865-1960

Rebecca Sharpless

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781469606866, 9780807834329
• eBook ISBN: 9780807899496
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

As African American women left the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture. Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives. As employment opportunities expanded in the twentieth century, most African American women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions. Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, Sharpless evokes African American women's voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home.

{1} I Done Decided I'd Get Me a Cook Job

BECOMING A COOK

Cooks were made, not born, contrary to white southern stereotype, and they arrived in their profession through a variety of means. A woman or a girl sometimes decided for herself to cook rather than do field work or other types of domestic labor; at other times, her family made the choice for her, or circumstances dictated her entry into the kitchen. The types of training that women had varied widely. Some learned at their mothers’ knees, others were thrown before the stove with absolutely no prior knowledge, and a few received formal training from home economists. Regardless of how they got there, generations of African American freedwomen produced meals as part of their daily work.

A COOK'S EMPLOYMENT BEGAN, of course, with identifying a position and being engaged for it. The process of hiring was an elaborate dance in which both sides negotiated for what they wanted. Relationships between employers and employees were often highly personalized, and an employer usually hired a cook for her personal qualities and not for specific job skills.¹ Word of mouth served as a powerful tool for employers and employees alike. Velma Davis, who worked in Washington, D.C., remembered, “Reference? Nobody checked that if you'd been sent by somebody they knew. That's how I always got jobs, through people.”² Sociologist T. J. Woofter commented on such casual engagements in his 1913 study of Athens, Georgia, remarking that women hired employees “without a shred of reference.” A few “housekeepers,” he noted, called a recent employer on the telephone and asked “a few questions as to honesty and regularity, and usually hire the servant without reference to her knowledge of cooking and trust to chance for the rest.”³ Lack of references increased the haphazard manner of hiring.

With such disorder, some white women engaged their cooks purely on whims. “The Lil’ Black Girl,” interviewed as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, recalled moving to Birmingham without a plan. She recalled, “While I walked about the station, a white lady and her husband came by. I will never know what attracted them to me, except that God was guiding my destiny. She stopped as she passed and asked if I wanted work.” The young woman worked for that family for a year before returning to Atlanta.⁴

Alice Adams and her aunt enacted a scenario common across the South, with a trusted relative acting as middleman in finding a kinswoman a position with a white family that she or he thought trustworthy. Adams came to Atlanta about 1929 at the age of fourteen, after her aunt suggested that she leave the family farm and move to the city to earn money for her ailing parents. Adams recalled, “My father's health had began [sic] to fail. He couldn't do anything on the farm. My aunt asked him to let me come to Atlanta to work. . . . My aunt sent me to these people.”⁵ Word of mouth and family connections could serve whites and African Americans alike; African American women could help one another find suitable positions, and Anglo women could assist their kinswomen in locating proper workers.⁶ White housewife Jane Stafford recalled that when she married in 1938, “my mother hired Nellie for me.”⁷ Such practices solidified family ties on both sides and may have also created friction when hirings didn't work out.

A number of African American women took the initiative to find positions for themselves. Just as former slave Leah simply showed up at the Thomas home shortly after emancipation,⁸ African American women continued to seek out employment. In Washington County, Texas, white housewife Mary Hunt Affleck lived in a home reputed to be haunted. The “hant,” she said, made it difficult for her to keep a cook in the days after the slaves were freed. Affleck recalled a momentous morning shortly after the Civil War when she was laboring to clear the breakfast dishes without a hired cook: “There was a light tap on the door. I opened it to find a real old-time negro woman, a veritable picture from the past, standing on the step. Her short dress of blue and white checked cotton, snowy apron and brilliant turban, proclaimed her identity with ante-bellum days. ‘Good morning,’ mistis’,’ she said, with a low courtesy [sic], while a broad smile wrinkled her black face. ‘Does you want a cook?’”⁹ Affleck does not indicate where the woman came from or even what her name was, but she remained with Affleck's family for forty years. Beatrice Walters seized opportunity when she saw it in 1923. Jane Stafford recalled, “She saw them [Stafford's parrents] unloading a lot of new furniture in front of the house, and she just walked up and knocked and asked Mother if she needed help. That's how she was hired—just like that!” Walters remained with the family for forty-six years.¹⁰ Cooks’ initiative sometimes resulted in their finding jobs that lasted for decades.

Elizabeth S. Collins, a middle-aged white woman in Dalton, Georgia, maintained a remarkable correspondence with African American friends in Cherokee County, Georgia, about fifty miles away. In 1877, she wrote to Dahlia Wood, a freedwoman who was about twenty-seven years of age, trying to persuade her to come and work. First she offered to pay Wood's transportation. She wheedled, “I shall want you to cook, iron, and assist me in cleaning up; if you wash, I will pay you extra for that, and you can do as you choose about it; as I already have a washer-woman. Please write and let me know when you would be willing to come, what you are willing to work for per month, and how long you would be satisfied to stay; and then, if we can agree about these things, we will make arrangements to get you here. I had rather have you or Georgia [Grisham, Wood's neighbor,] than any body I know of.”¹¹ Nine years later, Wood had moved to Chattanooga and Collins was trying to persuade her to work for a Mr. Holtzclaw: “He would be good pay and his wife is very pleasant and I think you would like her.”¹² From Collins's constantly cajoling tone, it appears that Dahlia Wood carefully picked and chose when and for whom she would work. Cherokee County, away from urban areas, may have been a difficult place to attract domestic workers.

Migrants to Washington, D.C., after World War I looked for high-status or prestigious employers. Wealthy employers could pay salaries promptly and provide fringe benefits such as paid vacations or holiday bonuses. They would, furthermore, have more experience managing household help and likely would be fairer to their employees than less-cultured employers. Historian Elizabeth Clark-Lewis observed, “Experienced, self-confident employers were not usually inclined to browbeat and belittle servants, whereas lower-status employers sometimes resorted to bolstering their egos or reassuring their social positions by mistreating their servants.”¹³

While African American women sought the highest available wages, the best conditions, and fairest treatment, most could not afford to be choosy.¹⁴ Anna Mae Dickson, who was born about 1912 in Grimes County, Texas, said, “Actually people chose us most of the time rather than we choosing them. You'd get jobs by somebody recommending you. So I've had to work for people that treated you like they didn't have any feelings for you. Some people, I don't care what you did, it was never right.”¹⁵

Annie Mae Hunt recalled the competition for employment in Dallas in the 1930s: “You'd see an ad in the paper, somebody'd want a maid, you go out there, there'd be 40 or 50 people already there. The employer really had their choice. The pickaninny didn't know who was gonna be picked.”¹⁶ With a constant supply of cheap labor, white people who could barely afford to feed themselves wanted to have hired help, as even textile mill workers employed domestic workers in their homes. Historian Walter Fleming observed in 1905, “There are some women who keep servants when they are not financially able and when they have no real need for them. They hire a poor class of African Americans and pay them even lower wages, from $2.00 to $3.00 a month.”¹⁷ This trend continued through the 1930s, when sociologist Arthur Raper commented, “The cotton mill wage scale, though generally low, is high enough to enable many white mothers to hire Negro domestic help, while they themselves work in the mills. In reality this is a comment on the small amount for which a Negro domestic can be had, and upon the Negro's consequent plane of living.”¹⁸

THE ECONOMIC STATUS of her employer often deeply affected a cook's work. Privileged families, with large houses and elaborate lifestyles, deployed an astonishing array of household workers.¹⁹ The McCall family, for example, employed as many as twenty domestic workers at Evan Hall near Donald-sonville, Louisiana, in the late nineteenth century. In a photograph taken between 1885 and 1890, a young woman named Lucy carries a milk pail on one arm and a water pail in the other. Historian Susan Tucker surmises that Lucy was “a cook's assistant, one who spent her time going between the garden, the barn, and the dining room,” tasks that slaves who worked as scullions would have done.²⁰ Martha Plant Ross remembered the household of her Ross grandparents on College Street in Macon, Georgia. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ross household employed at least seventeen servants: two stablemen, three nurses for the children, three men “in the dining room,” a full-time seamstress, two maids upstairs, two maids downstairs, two laundresses, and “‘Fat Anne’ and her stolid daughter in the kitchen, and they lived in the back yard.”²¹ “Fat Anne” and her daughter may have been the only employees who lived on the premises, indicating that they were expected to be available for most hours of the day and night. While “Fat Anne” and the woman at Evan Hall whom Lucy assisted could concentrate on their kitchen duties alone, such focus may also have raised the employers’ expectations for the women's performances. Cooks who devoted their days entirely to food preparation would be required to turn out elaborate meals of near-perfect quality.

Immediately following the Civil War, freedwomen preferred to do only one kind of work, and one Low Country employer searched in vain for a freed-woman who would agree to do washing as well as cooking.²² Cooking requires different, and often greater, skill than cleaning or child care, and women who cooked often commanded higher wages than maids or nurses. Cooking remained, therefore, among the more desirable domestic tasks.²³ In the 1930s, Sarah Howard bragged on her teenage daughter, Florence Howard. After several years of working as a nursemaid, Florence had advanced to the position of cook in her employers’ household, and she was making three dollars a week, her highest earnings ever. The Howards regarded cooking as a significant improvement over tending children, and Florence's mother was proud of her daughter's promotion.²⁴

Sometimes women made deliberate decisions to become cooks, while, at other times, those choices were thrust upon them by life circumstances or by employers’ preferences. U.S. Department of Labor researcher Mary Robinson's survey of African American women in Baltimore in 1924 revealed definite preferences. Women over the age of thirty preferred cooking and laundry to maids’ and nurses’ work, and they eschewed leaving Baltimore to work for families in the rural areas.²⁵ While washerwomen had the most autonomy and sometimes were paid the most, cooking paid more than cleaning and nursing and so was the best position outside of one's home.²⁶ The cook, furthermore, sometimes had access to leftover food.²⁷ Atlanta resident Willie Mae Wright recalled her decision to switch to cooking: “If you had a job nursing or something like that, the cooks never would give you nothing to eat fit to mention; so I had done decided I'd tell stories and get me a cook job.”²⁸

DESPITE THE WOMEN'S PREFERENCES, job descriptions were often extremely vague, and many women who were called “cooks” did a variety of household chores. Most southern households had only one domestic worker at a time, and that one worker usually had her hands full. Perhaps cooking dominated the list of work because of its necessity and its regularity. Employers got hungry, and it was the cook's duty to make sure their hungers were filled, at regular intervals. Dusting might go undone until another day, but meals needed to be fixed. Also, cooking was time-consuming, and other tasks could often be fitted in around the food preparation schedule. Finally, cooking required a specific skill set and knowledge base that other tasks did not. Undoubtedly, many of the women whom the federal census designated as “cook in private home” performed a variety of jobs. Food preparation remained a major part of each woman's day, however.

Want ads placed in Louisville newspapers in the 1880s indicate that almost 90 percent of employers expected their domestic workers to do some combination of tasks, including cooking, washing, and cleaning.²⁹ For most women, being “cooks” meant balancing their kitchen tasks with a constellation of other work, all of which their employers wanted them to perform with skill, speed, proficiency, and a cheerful attitude. Home economist Ava L. Johnson observed in 1932 that employers wanted a good cook with good manners, good English, and good table service, who was a good cleaner, and “who has a good disposition eighteen hours a day.”³⁰ In 1939, Catherine L. Wood of Atlanta wrote bitterly to U.S. secretary of labor Frances Perkins: “In Georgia people in the country and little towns can't afford to hire any one, so like shoe polish ‘three in one,’ only its 4 people's work they get out of one person 1. Laundry 2. Nurse 3. Maid 4. Cook and offer you 1.25 some 1.50 per week and 2.00. Once in a great while some one offers 3.00.”³¹ And an anonymous worker in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, writing in 1941, clearly referred to herself as “a negro cook” but nonetheless detailed her numerous duties, including ironing for a family of ten: “I start to work at 7 oclock and work untill 8 oclock at night[;] I have three meals to cook: 12 rooms house to clean up.” She concluded, “It is very hard.”³²

Such patterns of work began shortly after emancipation. Pollie Phillips came to East Texas with her owner in the antebellum period and remained in Tyler after the Civil War, “nurs[ing] hundreds of infant...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens
• Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens DOMESTIC WORKERS IN THE SOUTH, 1865–1960
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• {1} I Done Decided I'd Get Me a Cook Job
• {2} From Collards to Puff Pastry
• {3} Long Hours and Little Pay
• {4} Creating a Homeplace
• {5} Mama Leaps off the Pancake Box
• {6} Gendering Jim Crow
• {7} If I Ever Catch You in a White Woman's Kitchen, I'll Kill You
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index