often begin the day without a servant: the girls departed at night muttering sullenly, and did not appear the next morning. Moreover, her reputation for bickering pettiness spread through the length and breadth of Niggertown. It became increasingly difficult for her to find any one at all who would work for her. Completely flustered when she awoke to find herself without help, she would immediately call Helen over the telephone, pouring her fretful story into the girl’s ear and entreating assistance:
“I’ll declare, child, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I could wring that worthless nigger’s neck. Here I am left all alone with a house full of people.”
“Mama, in heaven’s name, what’s the matter? Can’t you keep a nigger in the house? Other people do. What do you do to them, anyway?”
But, fuming and irritable, she would leave Gant’s and go to her mother’s, serving the tables with large heartiness, nervous and animated good-humor. All the boarders were very fond of her: they said she was a fine girl. Every one did. There was a spacious and unsparing generosity about her, a dominant consuming vitality, which ate at her poor health, her slender supply of strength, so that her shattered nerves drew her frequently toward hysteria, and sometimes toward physical collapse. She was almost six feet tall: she had large hands and feet, thin straight legs, a big-boned generous face, with the long full chin slightly adroop, revealing her big gold-traced upper teeth. But, in spite of this gauntness, she did not look hard-featured or raw-boned. Her face was full of heartiness and devotion, sensitive, whole-souled, hurt, bitter, hysterical, but at times transparently radiant and handsome.
It was a spiritual and physical necessity for her to exhaust herself in service for others, and it was necessary for her to receive heavy slatherings of praise for that service, and especially necessary that she feel her efforts had gone unappreciated. Even at the beginning, she would become almost frantic reciting her grievances, telling the story of her service to Eliza in a voice that became harsh and hysterical:
“Let the least little thing go wrong and she’s at the phone. It’
