Babylon Sisters Read Free

them know I was family.
    But the voice on the other end didn’t have an accent. It was offering an apology.
    “Ms. Sanderson? Sam Hall here, and let me start right off with a sincere apology for calling you so late into the evening. I just couldn’t let another day go by without trying to at least touch base.”
    Sam Hall?
The name didn’t ring a bell, but he had a great voice. Deep and rich and too sexy for a business call, even one that came this late.
    “No problem, Mr. Hall. What can I do for you?”
    “The question is, Ms. Sanderson, what I’d like to do for you.”
    Too bad that voice was wasted on somebody with such a lame opening line. The voice was pure Teddy Pendergrass, but the rap sounded like a used-car salesman. “Do I know you?”
    “We met briefly at the Child Prostitution Task Force luncheon last week, but I wouldn’t expect you to remember me. You were surrounded by people who had been deeply moved by your remarks. I was one of many.”
    He had seen me doing my most recent dog-and-pony show. I do a lot of public speaking, mostly about issues affecting women and girls in the international community. These days I consider each speech almost an audition, since I’m job hunting in sort of a semi-official way. The day of that luncheon speech, there was a terrible story in the paper about the death of a four-year-old whose immigrant parents were living on the street. I was righteously indignant, and even though I was definitely preaching to the choir, when I sat down they gave me a standing ovation. Afterward, so many people pressed their cards into my hands, I hadn’t had time to sort them out yet.
    “That was an extraordinary day,” I said, sliding in behind my desk. “The spirit ran high.”
    “You made it extraordinary,” he said. “That’s why I’m very anxious to talk to you, and my boss is, too.”
    “Who’s your boss?”
    “I am proud to say that I am vice president of operations and development for Miss Ezola Mandeville. You may be familiar with her work.”
    Of course I was familiar with her work, although I had never met her. Ezola Mandeville was an Atlanta legend, a former domestic worker who got sick and tired of being sick and tired and started organizing other maids and cleaning women to demand better wages and more humane treatment. She worked for an old white woman who depended on her completely, and actually had a lot of respect and even some affection for her, but who did not appreciate her increasing visibility in what was becoming a full-fledged movement. When the old woman’s friends began to complain that Ezola was stirring up their maids, several of whom had suddenly demanded advance notice and extra money for overtime, it was the last straw.
    Her mistress reluctantly fired her the next morning, confident of finding a suitable replacement without much trouble and certain that, deprived of their leader, the other maids would return to their former state of docility and life would go on as it always had. She knew she would miss Ezola, but the world she knew didn’t have a place for friendship between white women and black women, so she ignored her feelings and put an ad in the paper for a new maid.
    The only problem was that Ezola was not prepared to go quietly. She was a fiercely independent woman, alone in the world by choice. Her job made it possible for her to pay her own way, and she did not intend, as she said to herself, to spend the next five years learning the ways of a whole new set of white folks just because these women didn’t want to pay cab fare when their maids left those mansions at midnight to catch the last crosstown bus home.
    So on Monday morning, instead of looking for another job, Ezola showed up at her employer’s house, where she stationed herself at the foot of the long, winding driveway to inform any of the other colored women who answered her mistress’s ad that the job was already taken and that their best bet was to move right