to day I lived in an all-white world and didn’t seem to notice the absence of black people wherever I went. Of course there were still Bill and Lorraina, but they seemed like an appendage to our extended family, rather than two hardworking individuals surviving in an uncaring environment, always there, always welcoming. At the outer edges of my thinking, perhaps things were beginning to pile up, however: the waiters at Culver, Bessie Smith, the segregation when I visited my grandparents in Miami Beach, that incident in Texas, and awakening thoughts about Bill and Lorraina. But my focus was on getting a job in the theater. Seeds had been planted, but they were still far from being ready to sprout.
4
Bill Rutherford
It was more than the usual kindness of the family butler. I used to think it had to do with my brother so clearly being the favored child. John was good at sports and a solid student. He didn’t need any special treatment. I missed a lot of school because of various illnesses, and I was continually falling behind in school. We were a study in contrasts.
As a child I didn’t try to parse the relationship. I loved that Bill Rutherford called me Skippy. He paid attention to me. Whether I was Skippy the kid who got skipped or it was just the name that came into Bill’s head, I was thrilled to have a nickname.
* * *
I don’t know why Bill and Lorraina stopped working for my parents. I was at Culver when they went to work for Grandma Bessie and Major. Maybe they really had been there to be like a second set of parents, and after I was sent to Culver they were no longer needed. Maybe my mother and father wanted to simplify. Bill and Lorraina had always been there to make our lives—school and sports and shows and concerts, social events, and all the rest—a little easier. They were there to keep the apartment spotless and to cook whatever my mother ordered by phone from Gristede’s. There was a laundress who appeared once a week, too. I took it all for granted and really didn’t think about how other families did things.
My mother definitely liked that buzzer in our dining room that called Bill to bring this or that. There was small talk—how we were doing in school, what was going on with the sports we played or followed. Dinner was the time we were supposed to be together.
Occasionally my father and mother talked about matters pertaining to the household economy or the economy of the allied households that fell under Grandma Bessie’s protectorship. And while that sort of thing happens in all kinds of homes, the focus was on Bessie, from whom all good things apparently came. Although I had little understanding of the mechanics of our family’s life, Bessie was the center of my parents’ attention. As I later understood, we stood to benefit from a society that stayed more or less the same, preserving our position on top. To say that money and privilege were the reasons my parents were not social activists would be too simple. However, few people question the order of things when it is to their benefit that nothing changes. There was no upside for my parents to agonize over the treatment of black people in the South, or of the help, or anything else.
Oceans of social and emotional change and growth long since covered, I’m not sure, however, that the whys and wherefores matter much. The specific social dynamic in our home was what mattered to me. We had domestic help. That help was black. At some point they got sent somewhere else within the family to do more of the same, and a relationship that mattered a lot to me changed in ways I didn’t understand.
Talking about maintaining the status quo, that probably applied to Bill and Lorraina too. They had escaped the South. As far as I knew they didn’t participate in the civil rights movement. They had jobs that kept them busy from morning till night as butler, chauffeur, bootblack, heavy lifter, cook, and lady’s maid. They served three meals a day except Thursdays and Sundays, when they served only one or two. It was their job to put the kitchen back together after those meals. It didn’t matter if the air conditioner was on; there would be sweat on their brows when they were working. But they seemed content. Or maybe that’s how