Apron Strings by Mary Morony

He couldn’t get a job if his life depended on it,” I said as I heaped strawberry jam on the buttered toast Ethel had handed me.
    “No honey, it wasn’t bout bein’ smart. It was ‘bout bein’ able to eat. I had to go to work. Momma had too many mouths to feed for me to stay in school. You is lucky an’ you should ‘preciate that you can goes to school; not have ta work hard.” She scraped scrambled eggs onto my plate and returned to the sink to wash the pan.
    “Did you make a lot of money?”
    “I made a nickel a day washin’ dishes and I was glad to git it, too.”
    I pushed the eggs around my plate half wishing I had gone to school. The tooth fairy had recently come and left me twice Ethel’s boarding house wages for doing nothing more than pushing out a baby tooth.
    “Did all your friends work, too?”
    “The onliest friends I had was my sisters. We didn’t have time back then to be makin’ friends. We worked from morning ‘til night most ev’ry day.” She was standing in the middle of the kitchen with her hands on her hips.
    “Did you have a better job than they did? I’d be proud of myself if I had a job. I bet Alberta wished she could have worked at the boarding house like you. I know if I had a job Gordy would wish he could have one just like mine. Were they jealous of you?”
    “Honey, you ain’t got no notion of what it was like to be po’. Havin’ a job and working hard ain’t nothin’ you know nothin’ about. Ya can’t help it; it was jest the way you was born. I was proud that I could help my mama put food on the table. And even then there was folks who had less than we did, and some of them was fools that didn’t do nothin’ all the livelong day. Mama would give up food to help those no-accounts. Used to burn me up good.”
    “Yeah, I know. There’s a girl at school who wears hand-me-downs from her cousin and her shoes have holes in them. She’s not very nice. My friend Faye said she was a no-account. I don’t like her either.” I was trying to understand what Ethel was talking about and to connect any way I could. If there was one thing I knew, it was that snobbery was a linchpin of our particular brand of southern culture. You were nobody if you weren’t better than somebody.
    Ethel clucked disapprovingly. “Honey, that ain’t no reason ta not like somebody, ‘em not being as well-off as you.”
    I’d stepped in it again, so I sought to defend myself with the third highest authority I could reference, after Ethel and my father. “But Mama says all the time that the Dabneys next door are not our kind of people. That I shouldn’t go over there. I should leave them alone. She even pretends sometimes she doesn’t hear Mr. Dabney call hello. Isn’t it because they don’t have as much money as we do? And their clothes are old? Isn’t that why you didn’t like those fools that Bertha gave food to?”
    “No darlin’, that ain’t why. It was cuz they didn’t do nothin’ to help themselves that I didn’t like ‘em.”
    I sighed, frustrated with the injustice of Ethel correcting me. Truth was, Ethel was every bit as much of a snob as was my mother. I knew she didn’t like Mr. Dabney anymore than my mother did and in one of our talks, I had asked Ethel about my uncle’s houseman. “Why does Leon have gold teeth with little diamond sparkles?”
    “‘Cuz he low-count people, and they don’ know nothin’ ‘bout nothin’,” she’d sniffed. Her lip had curled slightly, the way it always did when my Uncle Gordon’s name was mentioned. I got the impression she not only didn’t approve of Leon, but that she didn’t approve of my uncle either—just like with Mr. Dabney she never said so in words. One of the things I learned early on was that people didn’t always say everything they thought, and they didn’t mean everything they said. Even when Uncle Gordon would come into the kitchen after a party or dinner and give Ethel some money folded over a couple of