The Maid

Recently I watched a live performance of the Tony-award-winning musical, “Memphis,” on the PBS program, Great Performances. It is set in Memphis (where else?) in the mid-1950’s. The story is about how people’s lives were affected by two historic changes in American culture: rock-and roll, and the beginning of a change in white people’s treatment of blacks.

I was only eight or nine years of age when these two cultural changes began to shake the country. As for rock-and-roll music, I distinctly remember where I was when I first heard an Elvis Presley song. It was a Saturday afternoon, and our family was taking a drive in the car. When “Blue Suede Shoes” came on the radio, we laughed. It was a novelty. Like many people we probably thought that Elvis and his music were simply part of a passing fad. Little did we realize the tidal wave of change that was coming. Years later, in an article about rock-and-roll in Time magazine, Mick Jagger was quoted as saying that the whole purpose of rock-and-roll was to drive a wedge between children and their parents. Mission accomplished, Mick.

Because of my age and where I grew up (California and Oregon), I had virtually no knowledge of the racial tensions that existed between blacks and whites, particularly in the South. I was ignorant of the discrimination they suffered in schools and, for that matter, in virtually all public places, including the restrooms, swimming pools, and even the drinking fountains they could and could not use. All I knew from my own experience was that white people didn’t associate with black people. Until I was in high school, I never attended a school with a black student. There were no blacks in any of the neighborhoods where we lived.

Watching the musical brought back the memory of an incident that happened when I was a junior in high school. We were living on Knott Street in Portland, and my parents had decided to buy a brand-new home in the suburb of Parkrose. Our house was on the market, and one day my mother received a call from the real estate agent. She said she had a potential buyer who wanted to see the house. I happened to answer the door when they arrived, and there they were: our real estate agent -- and a nicely-dressed and rather shy black woman.

At no time, either before or since that incident, did I ever hear my parents say they were unwilling to sell to a black buyer. But during the six years that we lived in that house, from 1958-1964, there seemed to be an unspoken awareness among the neighbors that ours was a “white” neighborhood. We lived on the corner of 23rd Ave. and Knott. Black families were not known to live closer than about 15th Ave. Nobody ever spoke about the invisible line between the whites and blacks. But it was there. And  because our house was on the “white side” of that line, our realtor lied to us about the identity of the black woman, introducing her as the “maid” who was employed by a white couple that was interested in our home. She said that her clients weren’t able to keep the appointment, so they sent their maid to look at the house in their place.

I don’t remember how we learned the woman's true identity, but it turned out that the black woman and her husband were actually the prospective buyers. Afraid that my parents wouldn’t dare consider showing their house to a black person, the real estate agent, on her own, persuaded the woman to play the role of the maid.

Even now, in spite of the progress that has been made in the areas of civil rights and racial equality, we all know that, sadly, some invisible lines still exist.