My parents and my housekeeper

My mother wasn't Southern. She was a transplanted, very assimilated Jewish girl from Long Island, appalled by the prejudice that was so blatant and accepted in the South. She was also similar to Alfred Uhry's fictional Miss Daisy, the Southern Jewish grand dame, a bastion of liberalism who nevertheless wouldn't think it proper to eat with the help, any help. And the help was always black. Colored. That was the word we used in San Antonio in 1958.

Our house was maybe 1,400 square feet, and my mother was a housewife. Today we say "stay-at-home mom," but she paid five dollars a day for Ada to come into our home three days a week to do cleaning, laundry and a little babysitting after school. Ada was our maid, now called housekeeper.

Ada was a beautiful woman. She was younger than my mother and always attractively dressed, with her 1950s flip hairstyle and full-skirted shirtwaist dresses. The maids my mother employed, before and after Ada, were middle-aged black women with full girths and pinned-up hair. But Ada had style.

Racial slurs

Many neighbors employed maids one day a week to help with cleaning and babysitting. But we were the only home that had an Ada on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. My mother had a sensibility more in mind of country club cocktail parties than down-home barbecues.

I never heard the words kike, spic, chink or nigger in my parents' home. But children learn from everywhere. A kid called me "kike" in first grade. I didn't know what it meant; I'm not sure he did, either. It was the tone of his voice that made me shove him into the jungle gym on the playground of Woodridge Elementary School.

So when I was seven and my mother told me that Ada would be staying overnight, though by then I truly loved Ada, I told her she couldn't stay in our home because she was colored. The floor opening up and swallowing my mother whole would have put less panic on my mother's face.

Staying overnight

There are times when our parents give a stare as powerful as any mind-meld created in the farthest reaches of science fiction. She bent down and took my face in her hand and with a voice both chilling and soothing said, "That doesn't matter." I don't know if she spoke out of manners or conviction, but her words stand still in time, in my mind, in my heart.

Ada stayed in my room with me while my mother cared for her own parents back in New York. My brother, father and I sat at our kitchen table as Ada served us dinner. Then she stood at the counter eating her own.

My dad asked her to sit with us. Ada declined. He asked again, then one more time.

Later I asked him why he didn't make her sit down with us. He told me he stopped because he saw how embarrassed he was making her, and it was wrong to make people feel ashamed and that he hoped she would the next time. But she never did.

A different life

My parents didn't march or confront any of our bigoted neighbors, and maybe their small actions in our home were merely one grain of sand on an endless beach. But we should never discount the power of teaching a child that this is the way it will be in my home.

We moved to Los Angeles when I was a teenager, far from Southern practices, good and bad. Children were no longer obliged to say "ma'am" and "sir," suburban city blocks were unforgiving to bare feet, and we could never afford help in our house three days a week.

Not until his death did we discover that Dad had been a contributor to the Southern Poverty Law Center since its beginning and the Urban League even before that. My mother spent the rest of her years mourning for a more glamorous life that was never fulfilled. I can't say that some of her elitism (she would insist it was just good taste) didn't rub off on me. But, I hope, so did the simple, clear lessons I learned from my parents and Ada.