The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [10]
I put my hand back up on the plank hanging over the well. In Chicago, open crates showing off crisp, shiny apples filled market windows. I gave the plank a hard push. In Chicago, men delivered bottles of milk to people’s back stoops. I caught the twirling plank. In Chicago, I had a job; I had a little money in my purse. In Chicago, Isaac’s mother had money. Has money. My hand tightened its hold on the plank. My pulse hurried.
I pictured Mrs. DuPree, squatty shaped and her mouth always turned down. She owned three boardinghouses. I pictured the boarders and all the money they handed her week after week. Me and Isaac wouldn’t ask for much, just a little. It’d be for the children—Mrs. DuPree’s only grandchildren. We’d pay her back. It’d been years. Maybe she was a changed woman, maybe she had softened some. Maybe she had forgiven us.
I gave a short laugh. Isaac would never ask his mother for money. He’d eat dirt before he’d stoop to begging.
I gripped the plank and gave it a hard push. This time it went spinning so high that it whacked the pulley. It was a gratifying noise. It was so gratifying that I did it again.
3
MRS. DUPREE
Isaac’s mother, Mrs. Elizabeth DuPree, owner of the DuPree Boardinghouse for Negro Men in Chicago, had standards. She took only the men what worked the day shift at the slaughterhouses. She said they were a better class than the ones what worked nights. No drinking, no swearing, no women visitors in the rooms—those were a few of Mrs. DuPree’s rules.
“My responsibility is to do my part in advancing the respectability of hardworking Negroes,” she told the men when she collected the rent every Saturday. “We’ve got to be as good, even a little better, than white folks if we’re ever going to get ahead.”
That was how Mrs. DuPree talked.
The men listened to her, showing their respect by nodding when Mrs. DuPree fixed them with a sharp look. What they said, though, when she wasn’t around, was that they stayed on, paid the extra dollar on the week, and put up with her fancy standards all because of the fine meals I cooked. Not that Mrs. DuPree would admit to that. She was forever pointing out that her boardinghouse was the cleanest in the city. Her house was quality; it was on the far edge of the stockyard district. Quality and cleanliness—that was why her rooms were full. No one said different. The bedclothes were changed every other Monday, and the outhouse shined like a new Indian-head penny. But it was the food the men admired out loud.
Six days a week for nearly eight years, I cooked at Mrs. Du-Pree’s. Every morning, long before dawn, I let myself in the back door, put on a fresh apron, and fired up the coal cookstove. I was at home in that kitchen with its canisters of flour and sugar on the shelf, the coffee grinder bolted to the edge of the wooden counter, and the icebox by the cellar door. In that kitchen that wasn’t really mine at all, I baked rows and rows of buttery biscuits. My bacon was crisp, and I fried the eggs until the edges curled up and browned just a tad. That was how the men liked them. I perked the coffee deep and strong. After breakfast, I sent the men off to the slaughterhouses with ham sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. When the dishes were washed, I baked my pies, sometimes butterscotch cream, other times apple or cherry, depending on the season. On Saturdays the men counted on me to make a cake, maybe gingerbread or chocolate or sometimes a white cake.
“What’s for dinner, Miss Reeves?” the men asked me most every morning. “Fried chicken or maybe pork? Roast beef?”
“That sounds good,” I liked to say, teasing. I wasn’t going to tell them, and they knew it. Those men hated their work at the slaughterhouses. They deserved one good surprise in a day’s time.
Early evenings, the men showed up in the alley behind the boardinghouse, their shoulders bent and their heads down. They had washed at the slaughterhouses and left their overalls and boots