Episode 44: Sadie Rules

When it comes to our behavior, Sadie can be a harsh taskmistress. One day, I open a banana to find it rotten through and through. As I’m tossing it in the trash, Sadie appears from out of nowhere, grabs my hand and makes me pull it out. With a lecture about starving children in the world, she sits me down and makes me eat it. It takes a while because it’s so disgusting, and she stands over me with her arms crossed on her chest until I finish every bite.

I still can’t eat a banana.

Sadie enters my mother’s bedroom once to change the bed sheets and finds Jake hanging out the side window upside down, held in place only by his heels on the windowsill. Why? Good question because nobody knows, not even Jake. More drama when Mom arrives home.

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson with the banana, but Sadie catches me pouring a cup of milk down the sink drain in the small bathroom. I just didn’t want it, is that so bad? I’m taken to the dining room table where I sit, and she shoves a Bible in front of me. I am to read the Book of Romans. An infinitely better punishment, but it takes a very long time before I can claim I’m done. Don’t recall a word of it.

Sadie sometimes brings her large awkward daughter, Mary, to help clean the house. All too often, poor Mary does something wrong, real or imagined. Sadie drags her back to the tiny bathroom off the kitchen and beats her ferociously while quoting the Bible. It’s a terrible thing to hear. If we are in the living room, as we often are, we shrink into ourselves wishing for it to be over. This never happens when my mother is home.

Sadie comes to my mother with happy news: she’s going to be married. Mom, John, and I are invited. By now Sadie lives on the far side of Washington, D.C., and it is terrible to see how far she must travel by bus to come to us in Cabin John. Luckily for her, she doesn’t come as often as she used to.

We finally arrive at an address that belongs to a neat townhouse. We are in the middle of the black section of town. The first floor is teeming with family and friends, and there’s hardly enough room for us to squeeze in. When we do, it’s obvious we are the only white people there. Is this a measure of Sadie’s loyalty to my mother, or is it a bow to the standing racial order, the servant acknowledging the master’s dominance?

A long time passes. I don’t remember whether I talked to any of the other guests. Perhaps not. Finally, Sadie comes to my mother and tells her the groom has not shown up and won’t. It strikes me as odd that she would turn to my mother, rather than one of her friends or family members.

Sadie asks my mother what to do, and bizarrely, Mom says, ‘Let’s open all the presents!”

I’m sure Sadie wonders why the hell she asked this crazy-ass white woman about this. But choking back tears, she opens all the presents, people begin to leave, and we head back to Cabin John.

Many years later, Sadie tells us she has slipped away and gotten married in private. Her husband is a very nice man, and his little boy, at six years old, is darling. He will look at you with wide brown eyes and quote extensively from the Bible.

I don’t think it’s the Book of Romans.