Eating Jim Crow Part 3
Courtesy of The New York Public Library
In Part 3 of this WPA short story about Rosa Lee Johnson we turn to her life working as a domestic in Alabama during the Great Depression. Here life illustrates the intersectionality of race, caste, and gender in the Jim Crow South.
As an adult, Rosa Lee Johnson left the rural south for Ozark, Alabama where she worked as domestic for the Barnes Family. For $2.50 per week, she worked from 6 AM until about 1 PM cooking and cleaning. Mrs. Barnes “orders what she wants me to cook and I puts it on and goes on with my work. . . Then I serves the dinner and cleans up and leaves for home.” As we shall see in part 4, sometimes Johnson would tot something home to her family from her patron. If you hired a cook in south, toting had been the tradition that honorable women feed their cooks and let the cook take home leftovers and more. Toting had been an act of paternalism toward a person hired feed your family and a show of your superior caste standing. You have so much that you can afford to give it away to the needy. Toting shaped how upper class white house wives did their grocery shopping. House wives and their domestic servants viewed it as a tip and a evaluation of how house wife really felt about their domestic.
