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737 Catherine Sutton “Buzzard’s Roost” Catherine Sutton’s poem is a lament for the African American women who washed the clothes and served the whites of Louisville in 1880—and for those who still do. She has been a member of the faculty and staff of Bellarmine University for many years. h In 1880, 64% of all working women in Louisville, Kentucky were servants or laundresses. Housewives and servants passed laundry out the back door into the hands of black women who never saw a starched collar or tucked sleeve on anyone in Bug Alley or Buzzard’s Roost where twelve families clutched at thirteen brittle rooms. Each apartment, one room wide, was a mine shaft collapsing on the solid darkness and frail children, battered as the cook stove and the debris on which people sat and slept. Hung loosely on the back gallery porches, the outside wooden stairs led to the dirt yard and the one tap at 136 West Jefferson. The laundresses of Buzzard’s Roost carried water past the overflowing privy, up the rotting stairs before they could boil, scrub, rinse clothes to the brightness black women made from their own lives. On clotheslines in the yard, woven among the sheds and stables, they hung white flags and told each other the truths beneath the facts I’ve read in the 1880 census. Arms raised to ropes strung above their heads, stood: Mary Thomas, single, four boys, none still alive. Jennie Reed, a roomer, age 29, three children. Lizzie Lewis age 64, six children, 738 The Kentucky Anthology four still living. Nellie Simpson, Head of House, her daughter, 17. All the “best grade of colored girl” as the want ads required. These dark rolls of microfilm excavate the site now wiped clean by a Travel Lodge where black women climb the outside stairs unfurling clean linen in each room, banners shining for their mothers who send a bold, white signal from the yard. ...

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