Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [9]
Finch was worried, though. A deep-down belly kind of worry that cut his appetite so that he hardly tasted his cooking anymore by dunking his finger in his gravies, and glazes, and juices from his meats. Clarise could taste his worry too: His pot pies were salty; the texture on the skin of his lambs was tough; the brown, crunchy head on his baked macaroni and cheese was thinner now; even the glaze on his yams, which used to shine like liquid crystal, was duller, grayer.
It was the lure of the catering chains. Lyndon Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act, the last bastions of Jim Crow had buckled everywhere, and black people were flocking to J&A’s, McCloskey’s, Bain’s, to get their catering needs met. They still enlisted Finch for the teenage birthday parties, the Saturday afternoon club meetings, the private tea at somebody’s home. But they answered freedom’s call for the volume events where Finch used to turn a regular and substantial profit: the 200-guest wedding reception, the railroad retirement party to feed 150, the golden anniversary that was covered in the Tribune and would have given some ink to Heavenly Caterers. Those major accounts abandoned Finch, went instead with the display advertisers in the yellow pages that promised, “We’ll cater to all your needs, your place or ours.”
When someone mentioned the elegant affair they’d attended downtown, Finch would grunt, “Don’t dare talk to me about some established caterer who’s doing nothing but robbing people with god-awful potato salad and inattentive service.”
“But, Finch,” they’d say, “this is progress for our people.”
Finch would grunt again and rock back and forth on his heels. “You want to know progress for our people,” he’d boom. “Progress for our people won’t be had until that giant white man that all you silly Negroes run to spend your money with like he’s God on earth starts coming to the likes of me to spend his. Or,” he’d snort, “when that Mayor Tate hires Heavenly Caterers to do his inaugural ball.”
Finch got increasingly more despondent as he started chipping away at the exterior of their charmed lives. There would be no pony rides at Bliss’s eleventh birthday party, and summer for the girls would be spent at a day camp in the city. Last year’s Easter garb would have to do, and his plan to install one more six-jet stove in his cook’s studio would go on ice for now. It wouldn’t be enough; had to admit it to himself and the daybreak every morning when he started his food preparations and the daylight rushed in and hit him over the head, forced him to see that his passbook savings account was flattening out like a tire with a slow leak.
He thought about redirecting his business, maybe apply for a small business loan; that was certainly more appealing than accepting money from the aunts and uncles. How much like a speck of dust he’d felt the night before, right after one of his lavish Sunday dinners, an eye roast, pecan string beans, potato salad, and a side of chitterlings because the aunts and Clarise loved them so, and the aunts and uncles cornered him in his kitchen, all four of them, under the guise of checking out his new paring knives. Til told him that they had money; their daddy, who’d been born a free man even though it was before the Emancipation, had left them land. And Clarise had mentioned he wasn’t doing that big fraternity ball that he’d done every year that attracted thousands; they didn’t mean to insult his manhood by implying that he couldn’t carry his family in style, but the Negro has it hard, they’d said. Let them help, they’d insisted, please let them help.
But of course Finch was insulted, told them as politely as he could that there was no need to accept their offer, even accidentally nicked his thumb as he turned his paring knife over when he said it. Because he did need help, a quick infusion of funds just until he could concoct a plan for redirecting