Gather Together in My Name - Maya Angelou [67]
I applied for work along Fillmore Street. Neither the local beauty shop nor record store needed a manageress. The realtor said his friend, an Oakland businessman, wanted a cool-headed person to run his restaurant. I bristled with the big-city disdain for small towns; it was generally accepted in San Francisco that Oakland was placed on the other side of the Bay Bridge to accept snide remarks from city sophisticates. But the chance to rise in the business world to manageress was too tempting to ignore. I didn't entertain the thought that I wouldn't do the job well. After all, although my experience had not included managing a restaurant, I had successfully lived through some harrowing events and considered myself mature and adult enough for responsibility.
I took the train to Oakland.
James Cain was impressed with what he thought of as my college vocabulary, and the half-carat diamonds flashing in his two front teeth enchanted me. He didn't ask for references and offered seventy-five dollars a week and all my meals.
He was a large, gentle man who smiled a lot at life and kept all the details of his many business affairs in his head. He owned a dry cleaners, a shoe-repair shop, and next door to the restaurant, a gambling house. His clothes were tailor-made, and he wore them with a casual flair. If he had tightened his lips over the diamonds, and if he had lived in another world, he'd have passed for an erudite broker who regularly made killings on Wall Street.
“Cain's” served well-cooked Southern dishes in ample proportions and was popular with the area regulars. Cain had bought three unknown prize fighters and was pushing them toward championship. He wanted to upgrade the restaurant and extend dinner invitations to the successful white fight promoters he met at the gym.
He sat in a red leatherette booth and talked to me. “Ought to have a soup. And a salad. Ought to have a menu, too.” When I went to work for him, the day's choices were printed on a child's blackboard near the door.
NECK BONES
SHORT RIBS
HOG MAWS
PORK CHOP
RED SNAPPER
As determined as I was to make good at the job, I couldn't decide what soup or salad would complement those entrées. Soup had been for me, in my Southern youth, an entrée in itself, and salad was mostly potato or slaw. I suggested bouillon. Cain smiled at the sound and told the cook to fix it.
“Tossed salad. Roquefort dressing.”
Cain gave the signal to the cook.
I also told him that I had seldom seen hog maws or neck bones featured in white cafés.
The chef was told to cut down on his orders.
“They eat a lot of omelettes, and liver and bacon. I would suggest you stock Chicken à la King.”
Cain's keen intelligence had won for him the position of tycoon in Oakland, and he operated on the theory of an equal distribution of labor. He left the menu design and plan to me.
Within a month customers were delivered large menus which offered, in Old English print,
Chicken à la King
Irish Stew
Veal Cutlet
T-bone Steak
Peach Cobbler-Sweet Potato Pie
Ham Hocks and Mustard Greens (a sop which was
always sold out an hour after opening)
As dining business slackened, I had the opportunity to examine the gamblers carefully They straggled into the restaurant during the high California mornings, well-cut pants bagging away from their knees; hand-painted silk ties undone and hanging, flapping, forgotten, down their shirt fronts. When their hands shook coffee onto the