She could type 85 words a minute and was determined and smart. But black women didn’t have many job choices in the 1950s. Dorothy Weathers was single and had two boys to feed, so she took the job.
Yet in the years that followed, a surprising relationship developed with the white family. Weathers is now 84 and lives in a retirement apartment, still cherishing a thank-you card that holds a photocopy of a $10,000 check and the handwriting of the woman who employed her for several decades.
“Here is a gift of love and appreciation to a very wonderful lady, from Fred and Pat Pigott, who have loved you and cherished you for many, many years. There is no way to let you know how we have wanted you to know how we have admired you, and wanted life to be good to you!”
Pat Pigott gave Weathers the note and check in 1991 after her husband, Fred Pigott, died.
“I will cherish this for the rest of my life,” she said.
Long before last year’s popular film “The Help,” scholars in Cedar Falls began interviewing black domestic workers in Iowa, including Weathers, who had their own remarkable stories to tell.
The authors of “The Maid Narratives” (LSU Press), University of Northern Iowa professor Katherine van Wormer, David W. Jackson III and Charletta Sudduth, were surprised at what they found.
“The white people were just horrible in the movie, and silly,” said van Wormer, a white woman who grew up in New Orleans. “The stories were more positive than we thought they would be. All of the interviewees were very forgiving. They weren’t consumed by bitterness, as you expect they might be.”
Van Wormer’s own mother grew up with a black maid, although they were so poor during the Depression that the maid had to bring over her own pans to cook. Having a maid was the custom.
So was racism, discrimination and cruelty that were also found in the stories of black maids from the 1920s to the 1960s.
The domestics were often paid as little as $3 a day, were yelled at or abused, couldn’t use the front door or the bathroom, and were made to feel inferior to whites.
Yet a close bond grew between some white and black women that lasted a lifetime.
Weathers didn’t have much, so when she entered the upscale Pigott home in 1955, she didn’t know what to expect from a family that had launched a successful office furniture company in Des Moines.
“Some black women were ashamed to do day work in another person’s home,” Weathers said. “Not if you have to eat.”
Pat Pigott didn’t cook or clean and needed help. She hired Weathers on the spot and gave her the key to her home.
“I fell in love with her right away,” Weathers said. “I don’t know what it was — maybe like a mother-daughter relationship because my mother died in 1954.”
She saw a strong woman who behind the scenes pulled the strings of her husband’s business, once scolding the men for dirty jokes and butt-pinching that went on in offices in those days.
Weathers showed her how black folks lived. “She had never been around blacks, and I grew up with nothing but blacks in Kansas City,” Weathers said.
The Pigotts helped finance Weather’s first car, a 1967 Topaz, so she didn’t have to ride the bus. The car payment to them came out of her $5 a day earnings. But when it was paid off they told her that all the payments had been put in a savings account for her.
“They taught me a lot about how business worked,” she said.
It was an era in which Weathers couldn’t eat with white folks at the local lunch counter, when kin who fought in World War II could only get jobs few others wanted, and when other maids were poorly treated.
One of them was Ozell Robinson of Des Moines. She was raised in poverty in Monroe, La., but her church-going grandmother always told her, “There’s gonna be a better day.”
She didn’t want to pick cotton as a sharecropper, so domestic work was preferred.
She earned $3 a day. She had to use the back door. The front door was only for whites, as were the water fountains.
“You did things to survive,” said Robinson, 75. “There wasn’t a lot of things women could do then.”
They faced cruelty and intimidation, which was much more overt in the South, author Jackson said.
One woman he interviewed was treated kindly by her white employer until guests arrived. Then the white woman barked orders from the dining room into the kitchen. The black maid thought she had forgotten her name (Ruth) because she called for “Dorothy.” She soon discovered the woman was yelling “darky.”
Some white people took on a superior attitude. They told blacks, in so many ways, that they were inferior, a tactic to isolate and oppress the women, Jackson said.
“For many of them, this is the first time they could talk about it and begin to heal. It was therapeutic and they cried and thanked me.”
Robinson went on to marry a military man and move to Des Moines, where she raised a family and has a nice home. But she still remembers the day she quit her white employer.
She didn’t have a washing machine at home, so one day she brought her bedspread to wash and put on the line. The man of the house saw this and shouted that he didn’t want her laundry on his property.
The next day, the woman of the house was upset when Robinson didn’t show up for work. She begged her to come back, but Robinson didn’t.
“There were close bonds between white women and black women because they were together all day. They suffered through hardships in the family and the joys of weddings and new children,” said van Wormer, who also interviewed white employers for the book. “The whites thought of the maids as members of the family. The blacks didn’t see it that way. They had their own families and the white people didn’t pay any attention to that.”
Dorothy Weathers was an exception.
She was convinced of one thing: “You get out what you put in.” And she made the best of being a maid.
She grew into an exceptional cook, and well-heeled guests to the Pigott’s home began requesting her to cater their events. She eventually was hired by Holiday Inn. She worked there for 17 years while continuing her duties with the Pigotts.
Their relationship grew. One day, Weathers showed up for work in her white uniform, and Mrs. Pigott said they were going for lunch at Des Moines Golf and Country Club. Back then, blacks were only caddies and cooks at the club. “You’re crazy,” Weathers told her.
“But we walked right in there and I got to eat at the country club,” Weathers said. “Pat Pigott saw right through color.”
As they aged, Weathers would take Mrs. Pigott to her bridge game, eventually taking a card hand herself, or take her on drives, after she “nicked every car on 63rd” and couldn’t drive anymore.
Before she died in 1999, Pat Pigott gave Weathers her fancy embroidered footstool. “When you get older in life you will need something to put your feet on,” she told her.
It sits by Weathers’ chair now while she remembers the lessons the two women taught each other.
“My theory is there are choices in your life, there are consequences and, by god, there are changes,” Weathers said. “You have to choose to change. These people changed their thinking and I changed mine.
“Everyone should have a Pigott in their life to see how the other half lives.”
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