Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 by Rebecca Sharpless (review)

BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2013 91 Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 Rebecca Sharpless The cover of this engaging study of African American cooks in the century following the Civil War features an aproned cook seated in a galley kitchen holding a young white girl on her lap. The 1943 photograph, taken for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Administration, highlights the physical connection between the figures while touching delicate historical questions about class and race in the Jim Crow era. The gaze between the two figures draws our attention so that the cook’s enormously swollen knee, which supports the child, is easily missed. For this cook and many like her, Sharpless argues, a sentimental southern scene rested on a pillar of historical pain and complexity. Before 1960, the low wages paid to African Americans required nearly all black women to work, providing cheap household labor for white families. According to Sharpless, work in other people’s homes occupied a “middle ground between slavery and an open economy” (xi), with field labor the only alternative. An appendix documents the stunningly low wages paid through the period, underscoring the difficulty black families faced. Isolated by the nature of their work, cooks struggled for dignity amid racist assumptions about their intelligence and honesty—in contrast to the ubiquitous and jolly image of Aunt Jemima. Over the course of a century, cooks rejected live-in jobs in favor of day work to maintain family bonds. When other opportunities opened—in industry , schools, black businesses, beauty parlors, and government offices—black women seized them for better wages, shorter and more regular hours, and enhanced personal autonomy. Cooks labored to educate their children so they would never have to work in white households. Teasing out the experience of cooks from domestic workers in general proves a challenge, since many women cooked, cleaned, and nursed children, or moved in and out of these positions. But only cooking offered a culturally recognized creative space, the chance of local fame, and occasionally independence as a restaurateur or caterer. In few other realms were southern black women “allowed to succeed” (170), though Rebecca Sharpless. Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. 304 pp. ISBN: 9781469606866 (paper), $24.95. BOOK REVIEWS 92 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY even recognized cooks rarely earned enough to become homeowners. After World War II, one cook delighted at the prospect of public housing (96-97). Among the sources Sharpless employs are cookbooks written by southern white women that feature recipes by African American cooks. In Dixie Dishes (1941), Louisville writer Marion Flexner told of “our cook Molly…a true artist .” When pressed by admiring white women to share her recipe for shredded apple pie, she left out key ingredients or steps. Molly told Marion she intended to protect something she could do “better’n ennybody else.” Addressing her white readership, Flexner blithely betrayed Molly’s wish: “I’m afraid she wouldn’t approve of the fact that I’m sharing her prized pie recipe with everyone” (xxi, and Dixie Dishes, 125-26). Whites might enjoy the food cooks prepared, but the races rarely ate it together, one of many ways to reinforce white supremacy. Uniforms proved another tool of repression, and Sharpless reports that servants resisted wearing them in public. In the 1930s, Martha Poole’s Louisville employer assigned a different color uniform for each part of the day, the final pink outfit matching the dining room wallpaper. Not only did she become “part of the household décor,” but Poole had to wash (on her own time) three separate uniforms. She ultimately quit. Many who cooked for a living struggled to feed their own families. The book’s most poignant passages come from the children of cooks. Richard Wright remembered waiting for his mother’s employers to finish their dinner: “Watching the white people eat would make my empty stomach churn and I would grow vaguely angry” (103). The common practice of “toting” or the “service pan”—allowing cooks to take food home—compensated for low wages and the fact that cooks could...