From the Lancaster (O) Eagle-Gazette, a unit of NNCO/Gannett Corp:

I thought everybody had servants.

497 words Mark Kinsler September 1, 2014

The house my parents built in 1956 had five bedrooms: one for each of us, plus one extra to accommodate a live-in housekeeper. For several years that unenviable position was held by Margie Taylor, a slender black woman. She was perhaps in her 30's when she came to live with us.

Margie prepared meals for the family, including lunch for me when I came home from school each noon. Everyone ate together: the four of us around the dinner table and Margie off in the kitchen next to the sink. She cleaned the house, hand-waxing the delicate cork floors that graced the dining and living rooms. She did the laundry in the basement with the old-fashioned Easy tub-and-spin dryer machine my mother insisted on using. Then she'd set up the ironing board for our old Sunbeam steam iron.

Every afternoon she turned on the radio to hear network soap operas and the flamboyant Reverend Stiles, pastor of Cleveland's Miracle Revival Center. She'd make our beds each morning, and dust each piece of pretentious 1950's modern art on our living room shelves.

Between 3:00 when I came home each day and 6:00 when my parents returned from work, the poor woman patiently endured me. It went well beyond her job description to be regaled with every fact I read in Popular Science magazine, but she listened patiently to the adventures of the eleven-year-old M Kinsler and never seemed to complain.

It was also not in her job description to endure the days-long battles between my mother and father. Only rarely would I hear her mutter under her breath as she ducked past the combatants to perform her duties; I suspect my mother paid substantially more than the going rate for household help.

The rest of Margie Taylor's life was a mystery to us, though she once told me she was from Oklahoma. We never knew where she lived, or if she was married, or whether she had any children of her own.

None of this seemed unusual. Most kids I knew then had black housekeepers. Some were live-ins like Margie, and others took the bus each day up to Cleveland Heights from their homes on Hough Avenue or East 105^th St. You'd see them walking each morning from the bus stop on Mayfield Road to the rows of new 1950's ranch homes that lined Glen Allen Drive. And then back again, exhausted, for the bus ride to inner-city Cleveland. Margie made the same trip each weekend.

One winter evening I sat with my sister in her bedroom when Margie, in her old tweed coat, came in to politely say goodbye. She was leaving, and for good, apparently without rancor. I never saw her again. Perhaps she got married, speculated my mother.

“How many of you know a black person?,” asked my social studies teacher one day in 1960. Hands went up. “Besides your housekeeper,” he added. Hands, including mine, went down.

Times have changed since then. Haven't they?

Mark Kinsler is a science teacher from Cleveland Heights who lives with Natalie and the cats in an old house in Lancaster that gets professionally cleaned every two weeks. He can be reached at kinsler33@gmail.com.