South Central Noir

Mae thought a lot about what the young people were saying and doing, and she wished she could discuss it with Samuel. Damn that loudmouth Gus Jackson! She didn’t need him talking about Samuel, not when and where she couldn’t weep for his loss if she needed to, and she almost always needed to, even after the passage of six years. She’d miss him after sixty years. Maybe if she wasn’t in this restaurant all day, every day — their restaurant. It bore her name but opening it was his idea. Ten years ago this month in a little storefront place on Vernon Avenue. He’d truly be proud of what his germ of an idea had grown into — three times the space here on Slauson near Denker, the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks on the north side of the street visible through her picture window.

“Look like you girls gon’ get outta here early today,” Dave Hebert chortled as he burst into the kitchen. “Y’all done cooked up all them chickens already! Melvin said we’ll be sold out when y’all finish fryin’ up these ones.” He didn’t look at them as he spoke. As usual, he was too intent on transferring the money from the cloth sack he carried to the metal box he kept in the storage closet.

Mae finished battering and flouring the last of the chickens and Delilah grabbed up the big metal bowl of chicken pieces like it was one of her children, hauled it over to the stove where Sarah stood; the two women had chicken sizzling in the hot grease before Mae got all the flour off her hands. The three of them would literally run out of the back door as soon as they could. They couldn’t escape the hot, stinking kitchen fast enough. Mae was about to dump the flour into the garbage barrel when Dave emerged from the closet folding the empty cloth bag.

“What the hell you doin’, Mae? Don’t be throwin’ that flour away!”

“I used this flour for three days—”

“And you’ll use it for three more!”

“—and it’s time to change that grease too,” Mae continued. “It’s starting to smell rancid, and the chicken will start to taste rancid—”

“Y’all don’t throw nothin’ away till I say so, you understand me?”

“Yessir, Mr. Dave,” Delilah and Sarah said in unison.

Mae shrugged and nodded. She was damned if she’d ever call him Mr. Dave or say yessir to him. She took off and folded her apron.

“Y’all go on and get outta here. Mae can finish cookin’ the chicken while I talk to her.”

Delilah and Sarah folded their aprons and placed them beside Mae’s, gave her a nod, and exited the screen door into the alley. Mae put her apron back on and rolled down her sleeves: she’d rather be hot and sweating than have blister burns up and down her arms. Delilah and Sarah easily worked the three-deep, cast-iron skillets filled with hot grease and sizzling chicken while Mae got the chicken ready. Not so easy a task for one woman working alone.

“Everybody say this the best fried chicken in South Central, and that’s ’cause of them seasonings you use,” Dave said. He was way too close — directly behind her. If she had to back up out of the way of popping grease, she’d knock right into him.

“I’m glad people like the chicken,” Mae said. She knew she had to say something.

“What seasonings you use?”

“Family recipe.”

“You use it in my place on my chicken, it’s my recipe.”

She turned several pieces of chicken in the skillet on the front burner and two hot grease balls hit her in the face. She backed up fast, almost knocking Dave on his ass. She grabbed a cloth from her apron pocket and dabbed at her face, praying it wouldn’t blister. She turned all the chicken, constantly moving up and back, keeping Dave at a distance.

“You always been above yourself,” he snarled. “Runnin’ off to join the women’s army during the war, comin’ back wit’ a college-boy soldier, then runnin’ away from Loosiana to California, like y’all was too good to stay home.”

Mae didn’t speak. She also didn’t heave one of the kettles of hot grease and chicken at him, which is what she wanted to do. “I can’t give you my recipe,” is what she said, not looking at him, and still figuring out how she could throw hot grease at him without burning herself.

“You gon’ bring me that recipe t’morra, you smart-mouth nigger bitch, or I’m gon’ kill you and your college boy, you hear me? And you know how you better answer me!”

When he was mad all the cracker Cajun poured from Dave’s mouth faster than he could speak the words, and only somebody from Louisiana who’d grown up listening to the patois could understand it. Mae kept her back to him, kept turning the chicken. She’d be damned and burning in hell before she ever uttered the words Yessir, Mr. Dave. She was preparing for the hot-grease shower they’d both take when Melvin Gibson saved them.

He burst into the kitchen and stopped short. “Where the hell is everybody? I got a line out front waitin’ to order! How many chickens is cookin’ and when they gon’ be ready?”