The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-05-17
From the Washington Post.

From the Washington Post.
 | N the whole scheme of our civilization there is no factor so cruelty misun- derstood and so grossly misrepresent- ed as the colored cook. We do not refer to the smart young men and women turned out by schools and colleges; &C., complished. so to speak; "educated," in the jargon of the day; more opulently furnished with airs than blessed Araby itself; stuffed full of academic theories and dogmas. We refer, on the contrary, to the good old. plain black nanny who has never been to school and who couldn't scan a hexameter to save her life.
 The colored cook, so-called, has long been the butt of jeering merriment and contemptuous criticism at the hands of those who know nothing about her and for whom she wouldn't work two weeks at any wage imaginable. One sees in the newspapers and hears from the compla- cent if benighted rich who have "so much trouble with her servants whole volumes of ignorant nonsense on this subject. We are told how the colored cook is wastefu1. incompetent, unmanageable, and piratical. She is the priestess of lard and grease; she feeds great swarms of predatory loaf CTS; she is impudent, neglectful. futile, and untrustworthy to the last degree. Moreover, she turns your kitchen into a theatre of villainous festvity. and often into an arena of violence and bloodshed. And so 1t goes. The colored cook is al- ways wrong, corrupt. and evil minded. You understand her perfectly, treat her with the utmost kindness and tact Moth ing but her hopeless and incurable defi- ciency is to blame for the miserable failure. So you part company with the colored cook, dismiss her to the limbo of disrepute, employ a chef and ever after dine on mysteries with foreign names.
 But those who know the colored cooks; those who enjoy their confidence and sympathy; those who have inherited the gift of treating them as they are used to being treated-they. at least, are the beneficlaries of the misunderstanding and estrangement above referred to. As the ranks of the two classes dwindle with the passing years, the descendants of the old slavehoiding magnates and the relics of the now vanished institution draw closer together. They understand each other. They have the same ideas as to the proper relations of employer and em- ploye Neither would have slavery re- instated. yet both cling to the usages. the sympathies, the affectionate atmos- phere of slavery. Mrs. Bullion. in her great palace uptown. has her liveried iackeys. her glittering myrmidons her high -priced cordons bleus. The guests who assemble at her groaning board consume confections so beautiful in appearance that 1t seems d barbarian to dislocate them. They don't know what the dishes are composed of Neither does Mrs. Bull lion herself. But the expanse of linen. and glass and silver, is fair to look upon and the environment is princely. Never theless, in hundreds of Comparatively humble homes. the colored cook sends up each day series of simple, unpretending dishes that would make those banqueters fairly gasp for rapture, If only they could get them, and the tables of the wise are furnlshed forth with viands such as Lu- culius or even Mark Antony himself would have hailed as a revelation from Olym- pus,
 To employ myeh worn metaphor 1t Is money In the pockets of the weli-in- formed and well.insrlred to have thls breach between the wealthy spenders and