EMMA
Summer 1966, Mountain Drive, Destin, Florida
My first cousins were already huddling on their couch watching a new program called “Dark Shadows” on a black and white television in a cool, darkened room. Like every day after school, so did I, when I ran over from our trailer home to their concrete block house on Mountain Drive. We lived on the corner of Melvin and Mountain Drive, on their sandy white lot in Destin, which they referred to simply as "our property." A TV antenna rose over the flat stone roof which gave the house a sort of "Flintstones" appearance, minus the tropical plants. But instead of a purple “Dino,” the family pet was a dusty Collie named, “M’Lad.”
She was in the family room, too, ironing on an open board, close to the couch. She wore a neat gray uniform dress, trimmed with a white collar and cuffs. A styled dark brown wig adorned her equally dark smooth skin so that it was hard to see her brown smiling eyes over her wide mouth and nose unless she looked at you. She was pressing, starching, steaming and occasionally "hoo hooing” at a funny remark the children made, or softly saying "dat's right." I noticed that she wore a circle of lace pinned on her hair, like my mother did when we went to church.
“Who’s girl are you?” She asked me. I told her my mommy’s name was Joan and my daddy’s name was Ben. “Ben, Jr.? Do I know HIM?” You’s kin to the Marler’s? Das right, I knew dat.”
I asked Alesia what her name was and she replied, “Oh, she’s Emma. She’s our maid,” So, that’s how we met.
I was six, and Dark Shadows scared the breath out of me. I usually ducked around the corner and stood in the bathroom whenever Barnabas Collins entered the room to organ prelude. My younger cousins and me, Alesia and Randy, not yet in school, were not as interested in the plot as the older ones Alan, Alanna and Robert, who on the last day of school, had stepped off the big screeching yellow school bus from where they attended Choctawhatchee High School, the "Home of the Big Green Indians." I'd wait most of the day listening and watching for the bus, my signal that I could come and play with "all the kids."
I was home every day. My mom graduated from FSU in Elementary Education and since there was no kindergarten, she taught me at home, which I loved. We spent hours at the family fishing docks. She worked for my grandfather, Capt. Ben Marler, selling fishing tickets and took care of my one year old sister, Beth. My father was the Business Manager.
Robert, Randy and Alesia taught me how to ring baskets on the “court” their dad made between our homes. (It used to support a little building my dad used as a photographer’s darkroom, but later it was taken down to its concrete foundation.) But today, I threw down the ball and my little legs flew past the court when I saw the bus pull away after letting off all the kids.
Their mother, my Aunt Joy, mother of five, was an RN for Dr. Thompson in Fort Walton at White-Wilson Clinic and was still at work. So, too, was Uncle Hank, Alan Hank Hanshaw. He'd arrive home before she did, in a light pickup truck from his job on Eglin Air Force Base as a Supply Sergeant. He brought home old beat up, decommissioned tennis racquets, a basketball, or baseball bats and balls for the kids. Sandlot “football” was across the street and played with Ollie Lawson's boys, Billy and Richard, more cousins. You could see the four of them huddling under real helmets, big as men. A ball would sail, a scrimmage, then they’d all tackle each other and fall down.
My uncle always dealt us a "Little Debbie" snack cake from the top of the refrigerator, next to his Camel or Viceroy, and her Kent and Salem menthol cigarettes in long cartons purchased from the faraway magical place called, the Commissary. I'd choose my favorite snack such as the chocolate Swiss Roll, Oatmeal Cream cake, or Raisin Cakes, with sweet, grainy filling. "No, your mom wouldn’t want you spoiling your supper," was heard when we asked for more.
I suppose that Emma doubled as a babysitter. When Hank came home in uniform, he greeted the kids, “I’m home!” after walking through the screen door of the kitchen and closing it gently. (The kids, usually me, allowed it to snap shut with a bang.) At this, Aunt Joy and Uncle Hank, plainly startled, would yell to the kids to "get OUT of DOORS and DON’T, SLAM, THE SCREEN, DOOR.” "Ok, [BANG]."
"Athena, if you can't close the door right then go home!" It hurt my feelings so badly that I ran home, made a U-turn, and entered their house from the front door. They got a real kick out of that.
When Hank was home, he'd change into a white tee shirt, army fatigues, white socks and black canvas slippers and be seen pacing with a wheelbarrow. There was only a little “nut” grass, short stubble really, because the soil was mostly sand dune of quartz with a thin layer of black peat which was natural from vegetation. But he would drag a rake over the sand in patterns like a Buddhist Zen garden, and lay bricks on the diagonal around a pebbly planting area, beaten down by rainfall from the roof.
Stubborn fuzzy green weeds, yellow mums, purple white eyed stems, and white half faced daisies with not enough petals, grew wild; also milkweed, “ devil vines” that could trip you up, leaving your scratched leg burning and bloody. But, in the front yard, a beautiful Chinese Mimosa tree grew with rich green fronds, that waved liked fans in every breeze. It bloomed with pink pompons attached to lime-white stems. We pinched tufts from a “powderpuff to play “they love me, they love me not,” and let fluff blow in the wind from our palms like dandelions. Randy would pick another puff if the rhyme didn’t come out the way he wanted it to. They were perfect for little girls to dab on cheeks in pretend play “like mommy” powdering her face. “Scratchankle” were like poison ivy, little bouquets of ground weeds that a child would be tempted to pick. They had small deceptively cute white flowers but you’d know it if you walked past one with bare feet or legs because the itch was terrible.
Sometimes Uncle Hank would go to his “Shack," despite its name, a well built white storage and laundry room, and do loads and loads of clothes. Whites and colors and darks all together eventually made colors run gray. When they were bone dry, they'd be left on the dining room table filling the corner of the room for the kids to sort, and put away. Or for Emma to sprinkle, starch and iron.
When Aunt Joy roared up in her pink station wagon with the woodgrain side panels, parking on the pieces of airport runway steel that served as short driveway, she was a model of efficiency in her starched fitted, white uniform, wedge hat, and matching rubber orthopedic shoes. Her black hair was piled high, teased and pinned into a large shiny bun with Breck hairspray. The mound supported her nurses cap, as was the fashion of the day, and she wore bright," rosy pink” lipstick on her thin lips, which complemented her deep blue eyes and olive complexion. Hank was a Yankee from “Bahston, Massa-chooo-sitts”, nicknamed after Hank Aaron because he played ball. He had a JF Kennedy tan, golden wavy hair and very blue eyes, and reminded her of Kirk Douglas. She reminded him of Jane Mansfield, he’d say. "The Full Figured Gal."
We followed Aunt Joy to her car so she could give Emma a ride to whoever’s house she was living with at the time. But not before “M’Lad” would bark his head off at Emma, lurching to strangle at end of his rope when she came out of the house, trailed by us kids. (M’Lad was so bored, he barked at every visitor, every car on Mountain Drive.) Suddenly I said, “Wait, let’s all give Emma a flower!” I reached down for the tiny white blossoms and Alesia stopped me, “No! those are poisonous!” “Are the powderpuff ones okay?” “Yes.” So we picked two and ran to Emma placing them into her large pale palms outlined in brown skin. Randy couldn’t find a flower fast enough, so he snatched some small leaves off a dry bush and added them to her hands, with a shrug and a laugh.
“Ooh, DANK YOU! Dose are so Pwitty!” She made over our flowers like we had given her diamonds.
We instantly fell in love with her. Evidently, so did many other people.
She was a live-in maid for the wealthiest women in town, Mattie Kelly, and worked for Ella Clary (who famously had 11 bathrooms.) For this reason, she came highly recommended to working mothers. She was trusted to help raise the children of "the best families."
Then Alesia and I ran to water “M’Lad” who was usually panting in his shaggy coat under a pine tree by his dog house. (He looked JUST like Lassie, but he was not a girl.) My cousins’ side yard was just sugar white sand, so deep it quickly bogged down my running, exhausting my legs, and burying my white keds up to my shins in cool sugar where M’Lad had been digging.This filled up my shoes every day, but mom dumped them out every night before my bath, asking “HOW did you get so much sand in your shoes? Are you putting it in there on purpose?” “No, I said. M’Lad is.”
I guess that Emma was the first black person M’Lad had ever seen, too.
That night in the bathtub, watching the Ivory soap floating in the water, I asked my mother if Alesia was rich, because she had a maid. From cartoon stereotypes of a large “Mammy” washing dishes in slippers and apron while Tom and Jerry chased each other until she chased them both with her broom, and old “high society” movies from the 20s, I knew that this could be true. She said, no, that we were not rich, but that Emma knew Aunt Stella and Aunt Joy and was “helping” them.
Emma was also the only black person actually living in Destin, Florida for a remarkable number of years- like 30! She was only the second black person I'd ever laid eyes on. The first was a man on the uneven sidewalk in the rolling, tree canopied hills of Tallahassee who I embarrassed my mother as she walked towards him with my little sister in a stroller, by saying, "Look Mommy, that man is made of chocolate." He was thin, tall, wearing dark pants and a bright white tee shirt that made his skin look black, and he hurried away from us, crossing the street like he was doing something wrong. "Don't point," she shushed me. I marveled at the memory of that man, and of Emma. Somehow, I wasn't to see Emma again until she came into my life again, exactly 20 years later. (C) 2012, Athena Marler Creamer. All Rights Reserved.
updated 6/13/12.
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