Excerpt: The Personal History of Rachel DuPree
by Ann Weisgarber
Chapter 3
Mrs. DuPree
Isaac’s mother, Mrs. Elizabeth DuPree, owner of the DuPree Boardinghouse for Negro Men in Chicago, had standards. She took only the men what worked the day shift at the slaughterhouses. She said they were a better class than the ones what worked nights. No drinking, no swearing, no women visitors in the rooms—those were a few of Mrs. DuPree’s rules.
“My responsibility is to do my part in advancing the respectability of hardworking Negroes,” she told the men when she collected the rent every Saturday. “We’ve got to be as good, even a little better, than white folks if we’re ever going to get ahead.”
That was how Mrs. DuPree talked.
The men listened to her, showing their respect by nodding when Mrs. DuPree fixed them with a sharp look. What they said, though, when she wasn’t around, was that they stayed on, paid the extra dollar on the week, and put up with her fancy standards all because of the fine meals I cooked. Not that Mrs. DuPree would admit to that. She was forever pointing out that her boardinghouse was the cleanest in the city. Her house was quality; it was on the far edge of the stockyard district. Quality and cleanliness—that was why her rooms were full. No one said different. The bedclothes were changed every other Monday, and the outhouse shined like a new Indian-head penny. But it was the food the men admired out loud.
Six days a week for nearly eight years, I cooked at Mrs. DuPree’s. Every morning, long before dawn, I let myself in the back door, put on a fresh apron, and fired up the coal cookstove. I was at home in that kitchen with its canisters of flour and sugar on the shelf, the coffee grinder bolted to the edge of the wooden counter, and the icebox by the cellar door. In that kitchen that wasn’t really mine at all, I baked rows and rows of buttery biscuits. My bacon was crisp, and I fried the eggs until the edges curled up and browned just a tad. That was how the men liked them. I perked the coffee deep and strong. After breakfast, I sent the men off to the slaughterhouses with ham sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. When the dishes were washed, I baked my pies, sometimes butterscotch cream, other times apple or cherry, depending on the season. On Saturdays the men counted on me to make a cake, maybe gingerbread or chocolate or sometimes a white cake.
“What’s for dinner, Miss Reeves?” the men asked me most every morning. “Fried chicken or maybe pork? Roast beef?” “That sounds good,” I liked to say, teasing. I wasn’t going to tell them, and they knew it. Those men hated their work at the slaughterhouses. They deserved one good surprise in a day’s time.
Early evenings, the men showed up in the alley behind the boardinghouse, their shoulders bent and their heads down. They had washed at the slaughterhouses and left their overalls and boots stiff with blood there. But being of a particular nature, Mrs. DuPree made them wash with soap at the backyard pump before coming inside. I watched them from the kitchen window. In the winter these washings were hurried, the men shaking in the icy wind. In the summer, though, the men scrubbed their hands, faces, and necks hard, doing their best to rid themselves of the animal grease that worked its way into their skin. But even the best scrubbing couldn’t clean spirits worn down by the butchering of screaming animals.
I liked to think my dinners perked up the men some. They sat elbow to elbow on the two benches along the dining table and joshed, bragging about having the dirtiest jobs or about having the meanest bosses. This went on until I served their pie. Those men loved pie, but for some reason it changed their talk. Maybe it was because pie made them think about their people back home. Maybe it took them back to when they were boys and how they watched their mamas roll the crust. I didn’t know. But when I served pie, the men’s voices got deeper and the joshing quieted down.
One of these days, the men said after licking their forks clean, they’d quit their stinking jobs and go back home, cash in their pockets. Looking back, they said, thinking about it now, they weren’t sure why they ever left. If someone had told them what it was like in the slaughterhouses, they would have stayed put.
It was the money that brought them to the city, that’s what it was. But who could save money in a place like Chicago where nothing was free? Back home, now that was a different story. Neighbors were friendly, bosses were fair, and the girls were the prettiest in the world. Home, the men said, stretching the word long. Home. Someday, they’d go on back home.
I listened to the men while I scrubbed dried-up, crusty pans in the kitchen. This dining-room talk was nothing new. I had been working for Mrs. DuPree since I was seventeen.
When the coffeepot was empty and their plates scraped clean, most of the men went upstairs. Some of them played cards in their rooms or wrote letters home. Others moseyed into the kitchen. I’d come to expect this from the ones what didn’t have wives or sweethearts waiting for them in some far-off place like Louisiana or Alabama.
At first, Mrs. DuPree didn’t allow the men in the kitchen, but by the time I was twenty-five, she pretended not to notice. Likely she thought I was an old maid and that the men looked at me as nothing more than an older sister. But maybe there was a spot of kindness buried somewhere in her heart. She had a son of her own far away from home. Maybe she understood that a man needed to lean against a kitchen wall. Watching a woman tidy up was good for easing homesickness.
But not all of the men saw me as a sister. Some of them tried to court me.
One particular evening it was Thomas Lee Patterson who spoke up. Four other men ringed the kitchen. “Miss Reeves,” he said. “That strawberry pie was right tasty.”
“Crust didn’t do like it should,” I said, drying the last pan.
“Puts my grandma’s to shame, it was that good.”
“Better not let her hear that.”
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