Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody Read Free Book Online Page B

take the quarter Mama had given me for the milk. When I got home and told Mama, she laughed until she cried. Then she sent me up there every day to see if the old lady wanted her porch swept. I was nine years old and I had my first job. I earned seventy-five cents and two gallons of milk a week.
    Soon after I started working for that old lady, I stopped drinking her milk. One evening, I was cleaning the back porch where she kept it, when a little Negro boy came to buy two gallons. She came in to get them while he waited out in the backyard. She kept the milk in three old safes with screen doors. I saw her open one of them and pour some milk out of a big dishpan. Then she went out to the yard, leaving the safedoor open. Now this old lady had eight cats that also lived on the back porch. About five of them scrambled into the open safe and began lapping up the milk in the dishpan. She was fussy about her cats so I didn’t yell at them or shoo them away. I just let them eat. “She’ll run them out and pour that milk out when she come back in,” I thought.
    But when she came back, she just let those cats help themselves. When they had had enough, she pushed them away from the milk and closed the safe door. I stood there looking at all of this and I thought of how many times I had drunk that milk. “I’ll starve before I eat any more of it,” I thought.
    I could hardly wait to tell Mama, but when I did she didn’t believe me. “She probably is gonna give the rest of that milk to them cats too. I don’t think that woman would sell us milk she let cats eat out of,” Mama said. I didn’t argue with her. “I will still bring the milk home,” I thought. “Y’all can eat it but not me.”
    I didn’t keep that job long. That big old white house had the biggest porches I had ever seen. It had a porch on the bottom and top floors circling the entire house, which gave the house a rounded look. Pretty soon the old lady even had me sweeping the inside of the house downstairs where she lived and dusting the furniture. She started keeping me up there all day. Mama didn’t like that. One day she kept me up there until after dark. Mama came up there and got me.
    “What she got you doing she have you up there all day?” Mama asked me when we got home.
    “I sweep the porches and dust the furniture and sweep the bottom house. I was washing out some stockings for her today,” I told her.
    “You go up there tomorrow and you tell her you ain’t gonna come back no more, you heah. She been trying to kill you for seventy-five cent and that little shittin’ milk she gives you. Tell her you gotta stay at home with Adline and Junior.”
    The next morning I went and swept the porches and cleaned the house and stayed up there all day. When I hadfinished, I told her what Mama told me to tell her. I didn’t really want to quit working for her. I got a good feeling out of earning three quarters and two gallons of milk a week. It made me feel good to be able to give Adline and Junior each a quarter and then have one for myself.
    When school started again things were still pretty rough, so Mrs. Johnson got one of her friends, Mrs. Claiborne, to give me a job. Mrs. Claiborne taught Home Economics at the white school. I worked for her every evening after school and all day Saturdays. I really liked this job because I made almost as much as Mama. Mrs. Claiborne paid me three dollars a week and the work was easy compared to what I had been doing for seventy-five cents. Now I could pay our way to the movies every Saturday and then give Mama two dollars to buy bread and peanut butter for our lunch. Besides that I was learning a lot from Mrs. Claiborne. She taught me what a balanced meal was and how to set a table and how to cook foods we never ate at home. I’d never known anything about having meat, vegetables, and a salad. I enjoyed learning these things, not that they were helpful at our house. For instance, we never set a table because we