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an honor to have such a distinguished and creative person give his precious time to Midland City’s first Festival of the Arts. It is our wish that you feel like a member of our family while you are here. To give you and other distinguished visitors a deeper sense of participation in the life of our community, I am making a gift to each of you of one share in the company which I founded, the company of which I am now Chairman of the Board. It is not only my company now, but yours as well.
“Our company began as The Robo-Magic Corporation of America in 1934. It had three employees in the beginning, and its mission was to design and manufacture the first fully automatic washing machine for use in the home. You will find the motto of that washing machine on the corporate emblem at the top of the stock certificate.”
The emblem consisted of a Greek goddess on an ornate chaise longue. She held a flagstaff from which a long pennant streamed. Here is what the pennant said:
• • •
The motto of the old Robo-Magic washing machine cleverly confused two separate ideas people had about Monday. One idea was that women traditionally did their laundry on Monday. Monday was simply washday, and not an especially depressing day on that account.
People who had horrible jobs during the week used to call Monday “Blue Monday” sometimes, though, because they hated to return to work after a day of rest. When Fred T. Barry made up the Robo-Magic motto as a young man, he pretended that Monday was called “Blue Monday” because doing the laundry disgusted and exhausted women.
The Robo-Magic was going to cheer them up.
• • •
It wasn’t true, incidentally, that most women did their laundry on Monday at the time the Robo-Magic was invented. They did it any time they felt like it. One of Dwayne Hoover’s clearest recollections from the Great Depression, for instance, was when his stepmother decided to do the laundry on Christmas Eve. She was bitter about the low estate to which the family had fallen, and she suddenly clumped down into the basement, down among the black beetles and the millipedes, and did the laundry.
“Time to do the Nigger work,” she said.
• • •
Fred T. Barry began advertising the Robo-Magic in 1933, long before there was a reliable machine to sell. And he was one of the few persons in Midland City who could afford billboard advertising during the Great Depression, so the Robo-Magic sales message did not have to jostle and shriek for attention. It was practically the only symbol in town.
One of Fred’s ads was on a billboard outside the main gate of the defunct Keedsler Automobile Company, which the Robo-Magic Corporation had taken over. It showed a high society woman in a fur coat and pearls. She was leaving her mansion for a pleasant afternoon of idleness, and a balloon was coming out of her mouth. These were the words in the balloon:
Another ad, which was painted on a billboard by the railroad depot, showed two white deliverymen who were bringing a Robo-Magic into a house. A black maid was watching them. Her eyes were popping out in a comical way. There was a balloon coming out of her mouth, too, and she was saying this:
• • •
Fred T. Barry wrote these ads himself, and he predicted at the time that Robo-Magic appliances of various sorts would eventually do what he called “all the Nigger work of the world,” which was lifting and cleaning and cooking and washing and ironing and tending children and dealing with filth.
Dwayne Hoover’s stepmother wasn’t the only white woman who was a terrible sport about doing work like that. My own mother was that way, too, and so was my sister, may she rest in peace. They both flatly refused to do Nigger work.
The white men wouldn’t do it either, of course. They called it women’s work, and the women called it Nigger work.
• • •
I am going to make a wild guess now: I think that the end of the Civil War in my country frustrated the white people in the North, who won it, in a way which has never been acknowledged before. Their descendants inherited that frustration, I think, without ever knowing what it was.
The victors in that war were cheated out of the most desirable spoils of that war, which were human slaves.
• • •
The Robo-Magic dream was interrupted by World War