“I couldn’t open my own shop with this face.” Bessie was matter-of-fact about the world. “Besides, more people, whether they’d admit it or care, know.”
Bessie was responsible for the recipes, but it was Mrs. Lakes who made the cakes sell. Her dreamy, girly decorations and odd icing colors were a significant part of what made a BabyCakes cake a cake. In the early days, Mrs. Lakes’s decorations had made it possible to charge double for the confections. “I made sure they were good, but you had to buy one first to taste it.”
“More of that money coming in would be nice,” Adelaide said.
“Oh, Addy. The Lord has blessed me with everything I need. Can’t take any of it with you.”
Adelaide sucked her teeth. “You deserve better. We all do.” Adelaide cleaned house for a family two blocks over from the Lakeses and always came home cursing.
“Now, now, Adelaide. Enough with all that tonight.” Lefred pointed his fork at her. Normally, he would pat her hand, and she would quiet, realizing she too had had enough. “I just want to eat.”
“Piss-ass world, if you ask me.”
“We didn’t ask.” He went to bed first that night, leaving the women and Hazel to their gossip. Usually he stayed up on the porch smoking until Bessie was back inside her home.
Bessie scolded Adelaide as soon as the bedroom door closed. “Stop reminding him about all your wishing for a life you don’t have.”
Adelaide waved her off. “He knows what I mean.”
“You think that makes him feel any better, you bringing it up all the time?”
Hazel understood Adelaide’s anger. She remembered how hard her parents had worked, how tired and short-tempered they were at night. Bessie was still cooking three full meals a day, six days a week, despite having to hobble around the Lakeses’ kitchen. Adelaide, in her fifties, suffered from back pain. Still, she was always up first, making breakfast, and she cooked dinner every night, despite the scrubbing and washing she did all day. Though he never had much to say, Lefred was a good man, a faithful man, and he did deserve better than what he got—he deserved a fair chance at happiness.
Bessie, it seemed to Hazel, had found some semblance of it at the Lakes manor. She was famous there, an institution, having fed the town’s wealthiest residents. Her food—and her desserts especially—were part of what made a Lakes party a Lakes party. Every one of her bready, sweet, gooey, custardy, chocolatey, buttery treats disappeared within minutes of being served. This seemed to be enough of a compliment for Bessie.
Life seemed to be just as sweet for Hazel at the Lakes manor—until it turned sour.
In August the family’s second-eldest son, Theodore “Teddy” Lakes, came home for a visit before his first year at Harvard Law School. The oldest son was married and living in South Carolina, and the youngest was in college out West.
“They keep him away in hopes he’ll turn out good,” Adelaide hypothesized.
Days after Teddy’s arrival, while passing Hazel in the narrow hallway near the kitchen’s second entrance, he reached out and pinched her right breast through her uniform. He smiled when she clutched her chest in pain. “I thought y’all liked that sort of thing.”
Back in the kitchen, Bessie looked up from the pot of beans she was stirring as if she knew what had happened. “They all gon’ take after their daddy.”
Gossip about the Whites in Winston-Salem circulated through Cottonwood by way of the Negro maids, nannies, butlers, and drivers who overheard and observed the town’s deepest secrets. Teddy, like his father, and his father, even three generations before him, enjoyed every pleasure he fancied; Mrs. Nora, it was said, had her front door painted bright red so her husband would know which home was his. Mr. Lakes had three sons, but Bessie claimed there were at least two other redheads from other women. The three Lakes boys were blond now but had been true gingers, like their father, until puberty.
“He’ll be gone to school in a few weeks. Stay around the kitchen till then,” Bessie warned. “I’ll have Mr. Ford serve.”
“Are you going to keep working until then?”
“Lord willing.”
Teddy had been forced to attend college in Virginia after groping the daughter of one of his father’s employees. Legal justice didn’t exist for such circumstances, but Mr. Lakes agreed that his son would leave town; the White foreman had a degree of power, even against the uber-wealthy Lakes family, that was denied the fathers of the two Negro girls Teddy and his brother had forced to strip in the woods that surrounded Cottonwood back in high school. Murmurs about Teddy’s behavior with White girls in Virginia had required a hefty donation to ensure his acceptance into Harvard Law.
Teddy returned that Christmas with his new wife, the former Miss Lanie Crew. They’d married late in the fall at her family’s Virginia estate. She was an unremarkable blonde, and Teddy, who despite his reputation always had his choice of women, was a catch for her—and they both knew it. Still, she was wealthy, educated, and had been matched to Teddy by their fathers years before.
On the morning of Christmas Eve, the Lakes family drove, per tradition, an hour away to cut down the tree. They’d spend the rest of the day trimming it and wrapping gifts before their annual Christmas Eve party that evening. Being that he and his wife didn’t have children yet, Teddy’s presence at the tree lot wasn’t mandatory, and he offered to stay home and fetch the decorations from the attic.
He appeared in the kitchen not two minutes after everyone had left, pushing the service door so hard it swung and hit the wall behind it. “Are the biscuits ready?” He came to Bessie’s side where she stood in the middle of the room at the table, making a list. He kissed her cheek with an exaggerated, wet pucker.
“Not yet,” she said.
He went to kiss her again, but she turned her head, still writing. “Stop with all that kissing now.”
He chuckled, and Hazel looked up from picking the ends off the green beans, watching as he reached for Bessie’s face. “I love your cheeks, Bessie.”
She raised her arm, blocking his proximity to her face. “Get now.”
“Can I—”
“May I,” Bessie scolded. As the person who had fed them chicken soup when they were sick and bathed them, Bessie turned maternal with the Lakes boys.
Like a child, Teddy bowed his head. “May I have a turkey and dressing sandwich?”
“You can’t wait for dinner?”
“I’m starved.”
“I have to get to the store, but I’ll make it when I get back.” Bessie walked him to the service door. “You go on now. Stay outta here. We have work to do.” Bessie threaded her arm through the strap of her dark-blue leather purse. “I’ll be right back.” She insisted on running all the food errands herself, despite the strain on her seventy-year-old legs and feet, and always returned with two of something—bananas, canned meat, toilet tissue—and sometimes a third for Hazel. She said the Lakeses didn’t mind, and Hazel didn’t think otherwise considering the silver Cadillac they had bought her a few years ago.
She pointed to the icebox. “Start cutting that butter, will you?” The butter had to be at the perfect temperature and consistency to use; otherwise, it would ruin her famous Christmas biscuits. Served at midnight during their Christmas Eve party, with jam, Bessie’s biscuits were half the reason guests came. She served the Lakeses another small helping on Christmas morning with eggs and bacon, but the rest were Bessie’s Christmas present to the house staff.