Babylon Sisters by Pearl Cleage

watching her and nodding attentively. I decided he wasn’t really unattractive. It was just that, based strictly on his voice, I had been expecting someone else. In my mind, Sam Hall was a cross between Denzel Washington and Sam Jackson. When he turned out not to be anything like either one of them, I felt like he had cheated.
    He assured Ezola that he would communicate her wishes to the kitchen and then turned back to me.
    “So good to have you here, Ms. Sanderson,” he said, extending his hand. “I look forward to seeing you again.”
    I had assumed he would be staying for the meeting, but he was gone before I had a chance to say good-bye, pulling the big door closed behind him.
    Ezola Mandeville turned to me in my little sawed-off chair with a question.
    “You eat meat, don’t you?”
    “Yes,” I said, wondering if that was another test.
    “Good, good.” She lowered herself onto her throne as she nodded her approval. I guess I passed again. “I’ve had some people up here recently who acted like I was putting their lives in danger by serving up a nice porterhouse steak. Asked me hadn’t I heard about mad cow disease!”
    She rolled her eyes in disgust. “What kind of question is that? Of course I know about mad cow disease. I remember when Oprah got tried for even talking about mad cow disease. But what does that have to do with a nice lunch of steak and potatoes? Nothing!”
    I had to agree with her on that one. Mad cow disease was so far down on my worry list that I rarely considered it at all. When I want to freak myself out about an illness, I just look at the AIDS statistics and that’s enough for me. But this woman didn’t invite me up here to talk about cows. We were here to talk turkey.
    “Here’s the way I like to do business,” she said. “We talk first, and eat after. That way we can both enjoy the meal without trying to figure out what the other one’s thinking. I’m a busy woman and I know you are, too. We could waste a lot of time trying to be mind readers.”
    “That sounds good to me,” I said. “Sam didn’t really tell me very much when we talked on the phone.”
    She smiled and nodded, as though that were as it should be. “He’s very high on you. I need to be able to tap into the community of women you know like the back of your hand, and Sam says you can make that happen.”
    “I’m flattered,” I said.
    “Don’t be,” she said. “I want to help women stand on their own two feet, Miss Sanderson, but I’m not in the missionary business. I intend to make a profit and I intend to make this business grow, but there’s one thing standing in my way. Do you know what that something is?”
    I shook my head.
    “Sorry black bitches,” she said as easily as she might have said,
Would you care for a cup of tea?
    “Excuse me?”
    “Let me tell you what I mean. I’m in the maid business. If
you
don’t want to clean it up, I can send you a woman who will. It’s hard work, but it’s steady, there’s no shame in it, and it pays enough to keep a roof over your head and clothes on your back, but I got more jobs than I can fill. Why? Because no black woman wants to be a maid anymore. Nobody wants to clean up after everybody’s gone home or change a hundred beds a day or scrub the toilets out. These girls will do it for a week, a month, maybe three months, if they really need the money, and then they disappear. They don’t quit. They don’t call in. They just don’t show up one day, so the job gets half-done or not done at all. Then the white man who hired me to get it done right calls to say he’s not paying for the mess he got and what am I going to do about it?”
    I understood exactly what she was talking about, but her characterization of these women as
sorry black bitches,
however shaky their work habits might be, didn’t sit well with me, and I couldn’t let it stand.
    “I don’t think calling them bitches helps the situation.”
    “It doesn’t,” she said.