Eating Jim Crow Part 4
Courtesy of The New York Public Library
This is the final contribution to our series based on a WPA short story about an African-American women named Rosa Lee Johnson. She grew up in rural Georgia and in her young adult years had a family and worked as a domestic during the Great Depression. Her story illustrates the intersectionality of race, caste, and gender in the Jim Crow South. Johnson cooked and cleaned for the Barnes Family of Ozark, Alabama, earning a niggardly $2.50 per week. At the end of her 6 AM until about 1 PM shift, sometimes she ate on the job and sometimes her employer allowed her to tot food homes with her, but not enough to feed her family. Johnson recalls, “White folks ain’t as generous about their food as they used to be.” For many domestics toting served as a strategy to improve their meager compensation. When and what the toted home also served as indicator of their employer’s financial stability. Toting had also been an indicator of how an employer valued their hired help.
