Lizzie Baker, photographed by Cecil Beaton
Now I must go into an area of history where, today, angels fear to tread. Lizzie was the African American woman who worked for my parents as a live-in maid her entire adult life. She is the one picturesquely dressed, as she always was, in a white uniform and apron with a headscarf tied in a way that suggested a headdress, her whole demeanor when she was photographed by Cecil Beaton proud and self-confident. I have no idea how she maintained that pride and self-confidence, especially as she grew older, but I know it had something to do with the little house on Jacob Street in Smoketown.
She owned it.
Probably someone in my birth family forwarded her the small amount she needed to buy the tiny cottage. She was able to go there maybe once a month, on her day off, when she could find someone to drive her. As a teenager still living at home, I drove her once or maybe more than once and what I remember so clearly is her silent delight in going to her house. It was hers, you see, when almost nothing else was hers, not the uniform she wore seven days a week, not even that lofty headdress.
In her Smoketown house, she was, briefly, a queen.
If she was able to pass it on to someone in her family—she didn’t have any children but surely some nieces and nephews—it would have set a seal on her life. To own a house, to briefly inhabit it, and to leave it to a relative.
If that happened, the relative or the relative’s descendants were not able to maintain the house. It is in bad shape. How Lizzie would have hated that, even while recognizing that the time of live-in African American servants was passing and the other jobs available were even more badly paid.
But at least for her lifetime, she owned the house. The little house on Jacob Street in Smoketown.
The Wikipedia entry for Smoketown has quite a bit of interesting info, eg the paste below:
// 9 of 20 brickyards in the city had Smoketown addresses according to an 1871 Caron’s directory,[2] although none remained by 1880, as apparently the supply of clay from under the neighborhood had run out. The abandoned, water-filled clay pits may have given rise to the name “Frogtown” for the neighborhood, which appeared in print in 1880.//