Babylon Sisters Read Free Page A

along.
    It took only one day for the word to get around that Ezola fully intended to keep her old job, and three more days for her mistress to realize she couldn’t make it without her. The legend has it that the white woman finally took that long walk down to the street, and after several minutes of intense negotiations, they arrived at a compromise that guaranteed Ezola overtime pay for evenings, cab fare home after parties, and weekends off unless she wanted to work. None of the other maids got as complete a package as Ezola, but all of them got something, including a new sense of their own power and their mistresses’ vulnerability.
    When the old lady died a few years later, she surprised everybody by leaving Ezola a hundred thousand dollars, which her former maid used to open a training and job-placement agency for women involved in janitorial services. In ten years, it had grown into a multimillion-dollar enterprise with contracts from some of the biggest hotels and office complexes in Atlanta as well as select private homes in the same Buckhead community where she used to work. She was the regular recipient of awards for her innovative approach to preparing the women for work before sending them out to any job site. Employers praised her unique ability to motivate workers and pointed to the low drop-off rate in a field with notoriously high turnover. For her part, Ezola guaranteed any woman who wasn’t afraid of hard work a job whenever she wanted one.
    “I’m flattered that Ms. Mandeville knows my work,” I said. “Was she at the luncheon, too?”
    “
Miss
Mandeville,” he corrected me smoothly. “She doesn’t like to be called
Ms.
, but no, she wasn’t there. She depends on me to be her eyes and ears, and I’ll tell you, Ms. Sanderson,” he caressed that
Ms.
like he wanted me to know
he
had no objection to it. “I gave her a
big
earful of you after I heard that speech. You’re the answer to our prayers.”
    He was laying it on pretty thick, but that voice made it sound like the gospel truth.
    “I don’t know quite what to say, Mr. Hall. Can you be a little more specific?”
    His laugh was even better than his voice. “My apologies again. I fully expected to leave another voice-mail message, and when you actually picked up, it sort of threw me.”
    I hadn’t even gotten the first one. How long had I been sitting upstairs commiserating with Phoebe, anyway? Three days or three weeks?
    “What was the message?”
    “The message was an invitation to you to come and break bread with me and Miss Mandeville at your earliest convenience in order to explore the possibility of your coming to work with us on a project that is right up your alley. Are you interested?”
    His timing was perfect. It’s never too late to call if you’ve got good news.
    “I’m very interested,” I said, reaching for my calendar. “Monday looks good for me.”
    “Then Monday it is,” he said. “Miss Mandeville likes to use her personal chef. Can you join us at noon at our headquarters?”
    “Of course.” I knew exactly where their building was. It was hard to miss it. Mandeville Maid Services was housed in a newly renovated five-story building in the historic, but perennially depressed Auburn Avenue area. Ezola was reputed to have paid cash for her property, and her decision had single-handedly revitalized an entire block and endeared her to city hall.
    Every black mayor since Maynard Jackson had tried in vain to come up with a plan to bring back the glory of what had been preintegration black Atlanta’s main commercial strip, but the lure of huge, upscale malls like Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza had made the small storefronts of Auburn Avenue seem quaint reminders of a time that was as gone with the wind as Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation. Ezola bought the building for next to nothing and put the money she saved back into her business. When her staff had expressed concern about location, she said people who were