James Baldwin's South, Part 5 The Colored Window
Colored Restaurant, Courtesy of the New York Public Library
James Baldwin was a critically-acclaimed African American author and activist. Much of his writing focused on racial disparity and intersectionality in the United States of America. Part 5 of this series seeks to inform our readers on Baldwin’s personal experience with discrimination during the Jim Crow era through the lens of food.
Food from the colored window of segregated restaurants had become the established norm under Jim Crow legislation passed at the turn of the century in most parts of the South. It required that nonwhites sit apart from white customers in restaurants or purchase food at the colored window. As a northern-born African American living as a U.S. expatriate in Paris, this was James Baldwin’s first encounter with a colored window. “I found myself in a small cubicle, with one electric light, and a counter, with, perhaps, four or five stools. On one side of the cubicle was a window. This window more closely resembled a cage-wire mesh, and an opening in the mesh.” Racist southerners had concocted the notion that the wire mesh could maintain the purity of white customers when black customers came to purchase food at the restaurant. It is ironic that most of the white owners of segregated eateries in the South filled their kitchen staff with African Americans for their culinary skills and because they could and did pay them lower wages than whites performing the same work. Baldwin provides a rare view of Jim Crow traditions as an elite undercover black journalist unfamiliar with the tradition of buying food at a colored window.
“I was, now, in the back of the restaurant, though no one in the restaurant could see me.” Baldwin describes the tradition of ordering from behind the wire mesh veil ludicrous. He says, he was “nearly close enough to touch” the white customers, even kill them. The chatter and feasibility of white customers at the front of the restaurant stood in contrast to the silence and invisibility at the rear of the restaurant, which whites in power expected from black customers. Baldwin ordered a hamburger and a cup of coffee and paid for it in silence. An apparent local black customer came to the window to order food. The “black man came in, grunted a greeting to me, went to the window, ordered, paid, sat down, and began to eat” in silence. Baldwin watched the man eat his food “with both wonder and respect” because he couldn’t do that. Baldwin would instead, take his hamburger and walk outside and toss it in the weeds. African Americans who chose to purchase food under these circumstances needed wisdom, savvy, and thick skin. A flood of venomous white hatred and contempt often greeted black customers at “colored” windows. The back and front of the restaurant had their own choreographed dance traditions; the rear window proved less dangerous than entering the front door of a restaurant but for a northerner like Baldwin he found it that the steps killed one’s appetite as is stomach became “as tight as a black rubber ball.”
He describes the local native black man who could maintain his appetite in such a hostile space as one who should be feared because no mesh veil could restrain him from destroying Jim Crow laws and traditions. African American customers and restaurant employees did not simply capitulate to Jim Crow conditions in the South but employed what one scholar calls “infrapolitics.” In the case of segregated restaurants, infrapolitics included such everyday forms of resistance such as theft and sabotage. For example, blacks working the “colored” window at white-owned restaurants regularly gave away food or discounted the food sold to blacks. African Americans would also deposit their bodily fluids into dishes they served to white customers.
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