‘The Help’ triggers memories of working and living in the ‘Mississippi of the West’
We all have stories. But some folks have stories.
Those who have read Kathryn Stockett’s best-seller "The Help" — or plan to see the movie version, which opens Wednesday — know the difference.
"The Help," set in Jackson, Miss., at the dawn of the civil rights era, recounts the stories of black women who clean, cook and raise the children of affluent white families.
In those days, and in the decades before, Las Vegas was sometimes known as the "Mississippi of the West" for the segregation that held sway.
Those who were here back then remember — and have their own stories to tell.
Hannah Brown, 72, recalls family drives on Sundays down the Strip, past El Rancho Vegas and the Last Frontier, "all the way out to watch them build the Flamingo."
She also remembers taking the bus downtown to shop, "but even if you had a pocketful of money, you couldn’t buy a sandwich or a cup of water." And if you were riding in a car, "when you drove down Fremont Street, you didn’t get out of the car."
Lucille Bryant, now 80, looks back on the day she arrived in Las Vegas from Tallulah, La., as a 23-year-old.
"Oct. 23, 1953. I’ll never forget the day," she says — the day she found work at the Algiers Hotel, cleaning eight bedrooms (and bathrooms) for $8 a day.
"I had never made $8 a day in all my life," Bryant explains, noting that down South, she chopped cotton for half that amount.
"All this money? And working in the shade? The first thing I did," after starting work at the Algiers, "I lift my hands and give God thanks at working in the shade."
And every time she started at the bottom and worked her way up, Jackie Brantley, 63, remembers the way "people — especially white people — would just ask me, ‘How did you get this job?’ "
Brantley would tell them, "When preparation and opportunity come together, that’s success."
Brantley’s road to success led through the snack bar at downtown’s Guild movie theater and the old Westward Ho, where she worked as a maid to earn money for her wedding.
"It’s hard work, but it builds character," Brantley says. And the hard work taught her that "I needed to get my education so I would not have to do that kind of work" indefinitely.
She didn’t. After becoming a Desert Inn publicist during Howard Hughes’ ownership, Brantley worked for the Clark County School District and the state and federal government. And when former Clark County schools superintendent Kenny Guinn was elected Nevada’s governor, Brantley went with him to Carson City as his constituent services director.
As a youngster, Brown washed dust mops, baby-sat and helped her mother clean downtown offices of "all the whoop-dee attorneys" — before a job at a local record shop helped her discover her love of customer service.
That flair eventually led Brown to Western Airlines. (As she says, "What warm-blooded American person wouldn’t want to work for the airlines?")
She started as a telephone reservation agent because, in 1968, "they wouldn’t allow women to work on the ticket desk."
Brown eventually made it to the desk at the City Ticket Office, which had branches at several Strip resorts.
One of Brown’s customers was comedian Jack Benny, who created a stir the day he invited her to lunch, prompting other guests in the casino coffee shop to wonder, "What the hell is she doing with Jack Benny?"
Brown’s itinerary took her far beyond Las Vegas. When Delta Airlines purchased Western, she joined Delta’s corporate staff and became a regional supervisor, living and working throughout the country before returning to Las Vegas.
When Bryant first came to Las Vegas, "I’d say, ‘I’ll never stay here.’ The weather was so hot, and you couldn’t get cooled off. I said, ‘I’m just gonna make me some money and go back home.’ "
Five generations, and almost six decades, later, "this is home to me," she acknowledges. "I really love Las Vegas."
During her early days as a maid, "they would work us six days a week, no overtime," Bryant says. And although she was working on the Strip, she couldn’t cash her paychecks there.
Bryant and friend Hattie Bailey, 79, recall their days "maiding" at the Sands, when they had to bring lunch from home. Or, if they were lucky, one of their fellow maids would cook lunch — black-eyed peas, collard greens, pinto beans — on a hot plate in the locker room, while the rest of the maids covered for her.
But at least they got tips.
In those days, guests would leave silver dollars for the maids — and often "the tips was more than the salary we had," Bryant says.
"We had buckets of silver dollars at home," adds Marzette Lewis, 70, a longtime West Las Vegas activist whose resume includes 1960s breakthroughs as the Fremont Hotel’s first black cocktail waitress and the Showboat’s first black inspectress, overseeing the work of the hotel’s maids.
Eventually, Bryant became a powder-room attendant at the Silver Slipper, then moved to the Stardust, where she spent 31 years, most of them as supervisor of the hotel’s uniform room.
(One of her colleagues was Effie Conway, the Stardust’s first black housekeeper, who had been Bryant’s fourth-grade teacher back home in Tallulah.)
"I loved that job," Bryant says of her Stardust years, which coincided with the rise of Culinary Workers Local 226 and powerful union leader Al Bramlet, who helped improve conditions for members, including overtime pay and vacation time.
"That’s why they killed him," Bryant says of Bramlet, whose body was found in the desert near Mount Potosi in 1977 — after refusing to pay for two car bombs he ordered that never exploded. "People would say, ‘He’s a gangster,’ and I would say: ‘I don’t care. He takes care of us.’ "
Even with a union behind them, however, members often had to fight for their rights.
While working in the linen room at the Desert Inn, Lewis remembers the day employees lined up to clock out, as usual. Before they could, however, a security guard checked each worker’s purse because "they was thinking people was stealing stuff."
So Lewis "jumped out of line," told a co-worker, " ‘Don’t you dare open your purse!’ " and asked the security guard if he had a search warrant. ("My husband was a policeman," she explains.) The guard ran off to check on a warrant (which he wouldn’t have needed on private property), giving everyone the chance to clock out.
The next day, Lewis was ready for the security guard.
After buying a box of sanitary napkins, "I got me some ketchup, and some mustard, and some coffee, and I made me a sandwich," smearing the condiments together, "looking just like I had started my monthly" menstrual period, she says, with a mischievous glint in her eye.
Lewis asked her co-workers to let her lead the way. When she approached the security guard, she asked him, " ‘You got your search warrant?’ And "I opened up my purse," at which point the security guard "took off, and I never saw him again."
Local filmmaker Stan Armstrong, whose documentaries include the West Las Vegas history "Invisible Las Vegas," recalls his ex-boxer father’s days as a men’s room attendant at the Dunes, when a white Southerner "called him the ‘N’ word and he couldn’t do anything because he was afraid to lose his job."
Despite such indignities, housekeeping and kitchen employees at "the back of the house" were "the heart of the house," notes Claytee White, director of the Oral History Research Center in the special collections department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas library.
(White has interviewed numerous Las Vegans, including Bryant and Brantley, as part of the oral history project.)
When the back-of-the-house workers had finished their shifts, they went home to West Las Vegas, a neighborhood Brantley described as "a city within a city," with flourishing businesses, restaurants, nightclubs and stores in the 1950s and ’60s.
"We were the extended family in those early days," Bryant remembers, citing Sunday churchgoing and excursions to Mount Charleston and Lake Mead as favorite activities.
As a student at downtown’s Las Vegas High School (now the Las Vegas Academy of International Studies, Performing and Visual Arts), Brown had friends from beyond West Las Vegas.
She recalls one white classmate who told her, " ‘I really would love to take you home (to visit), but my family just wouldn’t allow it.’ With Las Vegas being segregated, once you were out of school, your paths would separate."
In Bryant’s experience, "from the beginning, Las Vegas was more segregated than any place I had ever been," she says, confirming its reputation as the "Mississippi of the West."
But Brown contends that it’s unfair to single out Las Vegas.
"I have yet to go into any city of this country that didn’t have prejudice," she says. "I’m not defending Las Vegas. We should have been farther advanced. But to label Las Vegas any differently, I think, is a stretch."
Besides, in Brantley’s view, whatever "negative things that happened to me, if anything, gave me more fire in my belly" to move beyond them.
In the living room of Bryant’s home, where she, Bailey and Lewis have gathered to reminisce about their "maiding" days, formal portraits of Bryant’s family members — featuring proud military recruits and graduates in caps and gowns — line one wall, silently testifying to their achievements.
"We could write a book about what happened to us," Bryant concludes with a beaming smile. "We have been through something."
Contact reporter Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272.
