my first year of divinity school is done and i am now back in atlanta with my little ones. in the end, i wrote a lot about mothering this year. (i made a devotion to the Holy Mother, ffs!)
image: a gravestone marking the burial site for a couple with a very punk rock last name, “mothershed.” rest in peace, mary p.
before the rest of my rosarian devotions get tidied, this essay popped into mind as one to visit again. i have been the recipient of some unnecessary mothering: reminders to stop being an a*****e, to check my ego, to do better from people, most if not all of them women, who partake in labor they should not have to do. unnecessary mothering is not pedantic oversight; rather, it is the teaching and learning done by women and nonbinary people of color despite and because of raced, classed, and gendered difference. unnecessary mothering is effortful and beyond generous. it is what bell hooks calls in Teaching to Transgress a strategic use of voice.
this essay comes from a class on womanist ethics and literature taught by the incomparable Dr. Stacey Floyd-Thomas. she asked us to testify to our lived experiences alongside and among Black women, and to identify the moral wisdom Black women have imparted in our lives. for the non-Black students, unnecessary mothering was a common experience. but, as the first assignment in the course, writing about unnecessary mothering brought the effortful, planful work of Black women to the fore.
now that some of the dust of the term has settled, it is right that i return to this essay. it will likely tell you more about me and my orientation to anti-oppression work than it can say about racially segregated and gendered labor conditions at this particular restaurant. both matter. yet i am publishing it for accountability. that’s the content warning.
No matter the season, I always could find the jam––peach, mixed berry, pear-and-apple––in the upper right corner of the pastry fridge. Labeled with the date and flavor written on masking tape stuck to the lid of each thirty-two-ounce container. Tessa’s jam appeared beside each lavender biscuit I sent out at Moon in my Throat, a Southern brunch restaurant where I expedited and managed in 2018. On weekends, these biscuits appeared in droves to match the waves of ornery customers that lined around the block, clamoring to pay upwards of thirteen dollars for scrambled eggs. The regular weekend back-of-house crew sweated, plated, and washed our way from seven AM ‘til quarter of three. I needed to keep the biscuits coming hot, whole, and garnished. Armed with the fourth-cup scoop I had taken from Tessa’s stash, I scraped together enough butter, jam, and biscuits to make it through each shift.
Inevitably during each brunch service, I would run twice, even three times, past the dish pit, across the back porch, and into the pastry room, where a swing door would release me into the fluorescent cool of Tessa’s workspace. As the house pastry chef, Tessa handmade every biscuit and every ounce of jam that sold at the restaurant, as well as every crumb cake, cookie, biscotti, wedding cake, and hand pie. Despite this workload, both Tessa and Mona, her assistant, scheduled themselves to avoid working on weekends. The pastry room became, if anything, a respite for the majority-White team of servers to sneak handfuls of chocolate chips for quick calories. Prep cooks would defrost huge slabs of pork and beef in gallon buckets next to delicate cupcakes that Tessa had finished plating for a wedding the day before. Bussers would lug tubs of old mimosas and bacon crumbs through pastry, as we called it, and into dish. And I would run into this room to snatch one or two more quarts of jam for my own workstation where I plunged them into the ice bath I kept for safe holding.
***
Planted in the middle of the front dining room, the pastry case revealed the brilliant sheen on Tessa’s chocolate ganache cake. This case also functioned as our dairy fridge and water station. After fetching juices and iced coffee, we tended to leave the sliding door of the case ajar, which unknowingly (or uncaringly) caused the cooling system to work harder in the Atlantan humidity. As we crammed heavy pitchers of ice water in between the cake stands and trays of cookies, the pastry case strained under the added pressure to maintain its forty-three degrees. The condensation catcher filled, spilled, and dripped onto the slices of chocolate ganache cake, growing shinier and soggier by the second.
That Friday, our barista had called out sick. Slammed with an unexpected rush, I found myself steaming milk and pouring tea. Placing a hot chocolate on the pastry case, I turned to see Tessa in her ballet flats and white apron folded in half and tied around her waist. She looked at me, then at the case with raised eyebrows, then back at me. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
For most of the White serving staff, speaking with Tessa was something you did not do. In fact, you did not want to enter pastry after Tessa had clocked in or before she clocked out. Teas had to be sweetened using the ration of white sugar stored in pastry before Tessa dropped off her kindergartener, Remy, at school or an aunt’s house. (The only time teas were not sweetened was when servers had drained pastry of its sugar the day before, either leaving Tessa or Mona to pour open huge bags of the stuff, or upending the day’s baking plans for Tessa to plan around, unbeknownst to the servers.)
Tessa was serious yet lighthearted about her craft, always trying new flavor profiles and recipes, bringing her experiments to the front counter for us to taste. But the mythos that surrounded Tessa––that she was unapproachable or even frightening––was only circulated by the White staff. Whenever Taylor, the only Black server at the time, opened the restaurant with me, Tessa emerged from pastry to ask him to make her a mocha. Their laughter added to the hot rhythm of Taylor frothing milk while I, recently promoted to manager, counted cash. Those mochas were the only food I ever saw Tessa eat, but it is possible I was too consumed by mythos to notice her humanity.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” Tessa was asking me––but it also was clear she was not asking. I stepped away from my coffee orders. She moved away, closer to the front of the pastry case.
“Have you noticed this?” She pointed to the condensation on the ganache. “It’s not supposed to be like this, wet. Look at the foil.”
The gold foil on which she had placed each pristinely cut slice of cake had beads of moisture on it.
“You can’t let this happen. No one wants to eat a piece of cake with runny icing.”
“I completely agree, Tessa. I’m so sorry to see it be ruined like that.”
She folded her arms. “You can’t let this happen.”
***
Temperature records for refrigerated units are required by food safety laws. Managers must check safe holding temperatures every four hours; if the temperature is above the safe threshold, the food must be discarded. On my rounds, I tended to the bar and walk-ins, where we chilled our champagne and sauces. My last stop, sometimes even the stop I would forget entirely, was the pastry case. This case, however, was Tessa’s first stop on her way from the front door and her last stop before heading home.
Although pastry––the case, the room, and the department––was the life-center of Moon in my Throat, it was abused by time, overuse, and neglect. Located in the center of the restaurant’s lot, sandwiched between the catering office, kitchen, and three dining rooms, pastry became the last room I unlocked in the mornings when I became a manager in late October. The lock to pastry stuck. The roof leaked nearly every night, rainwater pouring off the single table Tessa used for her baking. Even when it had not rained, a dry floor in pastry surprised everyone, especially Tessa.
I knew the extent of the damage in pastry: the flimsy lock, the cracked ceiling, the fickle refrigerators. But I hardly paid it mind as I fussed with the lock at last, mopping up the night’s rain and flour mixture at last, and checking the pastry temperatures at last.
“You can’t let this happen,” Tessa said. “And those ice pitchers will knock the cookies off the stand. I’ve told the servers before.” She turned and headed back to pastry.
Tessa knew me enough. As an expediter, I was the sweaty one who barged into her creative sanctuary, into her quiet conversations with Mona, her only colleague in pastry and one of the only other Black women at the restaurant, in search of jam and biscuits. She knew I was mostly polite, harried but polite. But her use of the second-person, you, called attention to my neglect of her hard, beautiful work.
Tessa’s business, named Remy’s Desserts for her daughter, was housed on the Moon in my Throat premises, where Tessa used the commercial ovens and foodstuffs in exchange for the jams, biscuits, wedding cakes, and pastries that the restaurant claimed as its own. More often than not, the logo for Remy’s Desserts never appeared on any of the bakes. We always had her signature biscuits and cookies for sale, unless my staff ate them all before customers had time to notice them. In fact, recorded pastry sales rarely matched how empty the case seemed; servers gave away cupcakes for customer birthdays or took the goods home to their families without paying. Tessa never openly complained about this apparent scarcity but instead sent Mona to the front with more, always more.
You can’t let this happen was a challenge from Tessa. The newest manager, I understood Tessa’s comment as a call to do better. Doing better not only meant drying up the pastry case, but also it meant doing my job right so she could continue to do hers. On reflection, I see excess moisture––the rainwater, the condensation––as one of the greatest frustrations in Tessa’s work as a pastry chef. Excess moisture throws off the rise in croissants, the crisp of biscotti, and the thickness of jam. Excess moisture makes workdays longer and working conditions less safe, for Tessa, for Mona, and for Remy, who sat in a chair from time to time, playing with leftover biscuit dough, while the older women kneaded.
Too much water dampened Tessa’s hard, beautiful work, the work done out of love for her craft and for her daughter. Here was a call to sop up, shape up, and savor the space we shared. Here was a call to let Tessa’s hard, beautiful work speak for itself. To do my job right so that the correctness of her job and livelihood could be witnessed in its fullness. You can’t let this happen was a challenge to my negligence. It was not the pastry case at fault but rather the leakiness of my perfunctory leadership.
Tessa did not wait to hear my assent or my plan. She had headed back to pastry. And I remembered that no matter the season, I always could find the jam––peach, mixed berry, pear-and-apple––in the upper right corner of the pastry fridge, properly chilled, sealed tight to keep out moisture, placed out of harm’s way.
