Lilly Mae

I can’t say that I quite understood how a colored woman felt. I can’t say that I quite understood how a colored man felt. Last week a black man’s house was set on fire because he shared a home with a white woman and her kids. I lived with my husband and my children. There wasn’t no law keeping me from running my home. There weren’t people banging on my door, no kerosene being poured on my porch.

I didn’t understand how a colored person lived. When I grew up, I had a maid. Her name was Lilly Mae, and she was a Negro. She raised me. She potty trained me. She taught me not to bite my siblings, or my peers. She fed my entire family. I couldn’t recall a time when my mother cooked for me; it was always Lilly Mae. Sometimes, when I got a whiff of my own cooking, I go back to Thanksgivings and Christmases and Sunday evenings after church, and I see Lilly Mae smiling at me from her spot in the kitchen. That was where I always knew to find her, in the kitchen. She cleaned the bathrooms sometimes, too. I stayed away from her then, though. She always had a grimace on her face. That was when she truly looked like an overworked, underpaid, tired-of-all-this-shit colored woman. When she was cooking, she looked like she forgot she was cooking for a white woman’s family.

Lilly Mae had a family of her own. I reckon she was too sore and exhausted to cook for her own kids when she got home. She didn’t have a husband to look after her. She had five little ones, though, somehow. I never asked who their daddies were; it wasn’t none of my business. Nothing that really happened with Lilly Mae was my business, to be frank. She was just my mother’s maid. She wasn’t supposed to be anything special to me, but she was. Lilly Mae stopped working for my mother and my daddy when my brothers and I grew up. She went on to raise more white women’s children. I imagine she was getting grey in the hair and wrinkled in the skin, but her deep, wise voice would always be still the same. In my head, I heard her voice sometimes when I was cooking, when I was cleaning, when I was taking care of my children. I watched Lilly Mae enough to know how to keep a home. I didn’t need no Negro to do it for me. And for that, I wanted to thank Lilly Mae.

I can’t say that I quite understood how a colored woman felt. I can’t say that I quite understood how a colored man felt. But I could say that I wish I’d gotten the opportunity to thank Lilly Mae for all she’d done, all she’d done for every white child she’d brought up. If I could, I’d thank her for not complaining when she had to use a different bathroom than the rest of my white family. Because Negroes carry different diseases, Mother always said. I’d thank Lilly Mae for being more of a mother to me than the woman who birthed me was, for being more of a mother for all the white kids she’d looked over in her days.