A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton - Michael R. Phillips [24]
“I … I want to ask about that sign you got in the window,” I said, “saying you’re wanting a colored girl.”
“I’ll get the manager,” he said, then turned and left.
My heart was pounding, but I stood there and waited and tried to calm my insides down.
A minute or two later the same man appeared again from through the door where he’d gone. He was followed by another man, a little older and half bald and kinda fat, though nowhere near as large as Josepha. He was wearing a shiny black vest and a funny-looking thin string tie around his neck and down the front.
“What’s your name, girl?” he said when he got to me. He was just like all the white people in this town—he didn’t seem to know how to smile.
“Mary Ann,” I said.
“Mary Ann what?”
“Jukes.”
“Where you from? Who was your master?”
“Master McSimmons, sir.”
The man nodded.
“You still living there?” he said.
“No, sir.”
“Where, then?”
“Uh … somewhere else … where I went after I left Master McSimmons,” I said.
The man looked at me a little suspicious. “Well, I don’t suppose that matters. You know how to work?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know how to keep your mouth shut and mind your betters?”
“Uh … yes, sir.”
“And do what you’re told?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Come along, then, I’ll show you the room.”
He came out from behind the counter and walked through the hotel. I followed him. We walked through a long hallway and pretty soon came out at the back of the building and outside. I kept following until we came to a little building out at the back. We went through a door into another dark hallway, walked almost all the way to the other end, turned a corner, went up a narrow stairway, and then stopped. He opened a door and walked in.
“This is where you’ll stay,” he said. “You got any things with you, put them in here. Then come to the front desk and I’ll put you to work.”
I glanced around. The room was so tiny, there was only room for the bed against the small wall and a tiny table and chair. It didn’t look too clean, and from where I was standing I thought the mattress on the bed was stuffed with straw, like my old one had been at the McSimmons colored town. The place didn’t particularly strike me as where I wanted to live for the next few years, even for ten cents a day.
“I don’t know if I want to take the job yet, sir,” I said.
“What! An uppity one, are you? I should’ve seen it in that ugly face of yours. What are you wasting my time for!”
“I’m sorry, sir. I just wanted to know about it.”
“Get out of here, and don’t show your face around this hotel again unless you’re ready to go to work.”
He huffed out of the room and down the stairs, leaving me to find my own way back out to the street in front.
DECISION
13
IWALKED OUT OF THE HOTEL, FEELING THE SCOWL of the manager’s eyes on my back from the counter, where I knew he was watching me.
I came out onto the boardwalk and started back the way I had come. As I retraced my steps from earlier, all kinds of new things to think about were swirling in my brain.
A job!
A real job, a room of my very own … and real money! It wasn’t much of a room, and maybe the ten cents a day wasn’t even half what the white person’s job got. But it would be mine … my own room, my own money.
I could buy things, clothes for myself, a pair of shoes …
I looked down at the white handkerchief I still had clutched in one hand. If I took that job I could buy all the lace handkerchiefs I could ever want. I could buy a dozen of them if I wanted to! With every kind of colored ribbon I could think of!
All at once my future was full of so many possibilities and opportunities. Not only wasn’t I a runaway slave … why, I could be and do anything I wanted to!
I was walking slow, thinking about so many things.
Did I … did I really want to take that job? Even with the gruff hotel manager and lumpy straw mattress and dinky little room.
What a change it would be!
Once I started getting paid, maybe I’d even have to open an account in that bank, just for me, in my own name—a bank account that said Mary Ann Jukes on it.
But then the question