Op-Ed Columns

I cannot recall ever watching the soap opera. When it was on I wasn’t home. About the only thing I know about the show comes from a comment made by my daddy sometime back in the 1960s. Speaking to no one in particular he observed, “those folks (meaning the ones on The World) have every problem but money. They are a bunch of rich SOBs.”

Daddy should know.

He watched it.

So did mama.

And so did Kathryn.

Let me tell you about Kathryn.

My mama worked up at the courthouse. In an agriculture department that had evolved from the New Deal’s Triple-A to SCS to TMA to ASCS and no doubt is evolving still, if Congress has anything to do with it. And because mama worked, mama needed “help” around the house. So she hired Kathryn.

That was about 1956. About the time The World started turning.

Things were different back then. Not better. Just different.

Those days it was fairly common for a middle-class small-town white family to have a full-time maid/housekeeper/cleaning lady/cook — a situation that says less about the relative affluence of Alabama’s bourgeoisie than it does about the limited options open to the state’s African Americans. I read somewhere that around then the largest employment category in the city of Mobile, just down the road from us, was “female domestics.” Probably wasn’t the largest where we lived, but there were a lot of them.

And Kathryn was ours.

And we were hers.

Today our intertwined lives seem confusing and contradictory, ironic and for me, at times, unsettling. I was barely in my teens. My brother was about 5. Yet we called Kathryn, an adult woman, by her first name — except for the times my brother called her “mother dear” because that was what Kathryn’s daughter called her, and he picked it up. My folks thought it was “cute” — another bit of the racial puzzle I was trying to put together.

We paid her what seems today a pittance on which she had to support herself and three children — her husband had left for a better life in Chicago and never came back. But included in the arrangement was food from our table and truck from daddy’s garden, so the bag she brought empty every morning was always full when we took her home.

We also paid her Social Security.

That created something of a controversy. Mama, being in the courthouse, heard that most of the “independently employed” folks in the county — maids, yardmen, sharecroppers, loggers, day laborers of all sorts — were not signed up for Social Security. So mama took Kathryn in and got her enrolled. Kathryn told her friends and pretty soon other “domestics” were demanding the same. White ladies mumbled that mama was meddling with the system. Black ladies mumbled “good for her.”

But what I remember most about that relationship — mama, daddy, Kathryn — is what they told me happened as The World turned.

They were addicted to the show — all three of them. But there was a problem. The World turned in the middle of the day. In the middle of dinner. (My folks did not “do lunch.” They ate dinner. And in the evening they ate supper. Just like Jesus did. Whoever heard of the “Last Dinner”?)

So you would think that mama, daddy and Kathryn would sit down together, eat dinner together and watch The World Turns together.

And you would be wrong.

Because back then white folks and black folks, boss folks and “help,” didn’t sit down together to eat.

But they could watch TV together — TV being new to the South, had not yet fallen under the rules of segregation.

Therefore mama and daddy and Kathryn (off by herself) would rush through dinner so at 12:30 they could gather and watch.

Only some times they would not get finished. Daddy would want another helping or there would be a phone call — any number of things could disrupt segregation’s schedule.

What to do?

Miss the first part of the show?

Or eat together?

A decision had to be made.

And it was.

So it came to pass that in the days that followed my parents would arrive for the noonday meal. Kathryn would have it ready — for all of them. And they would take their plates and sit down, together, in front of the TV and watch those rich sumbitches fight and frolic and frisk and fornicate right there before their very eyes.

And despite what segregationists warned would happen if the South started doing this sort of thing, The World kept right on turning.