His mother probably called him “Penny,” because he would have been small and dark copper in color at birth.  All names are subject to familiar abbreviation, and a male child would lose the diminutive “Penny” tag as soon as possible.  He made do without any last name I ever heard for the first half of his life.  Ours was a small town where everyone knew everyone else, and a first name and brief recitation of personal characteristics served quite well for identification.

“I'm looking for Penn; he carries a razor in his sock and has a mouth full of gold teeth.”

“Yassuh, he totin’ marketin’ fo’ Miz Rupe terday, ovah to Fores’ Park.”

It was around 1964, thirty years after he’d first knocked on my grandparents’ door looking for odd jobs, that concerns related to Social Security interested him in the formality of a last name.  “West” came with a social security number transplanted from a corpse by a friend of the family, following a procedure irregular but not uncommon in the Deep South at the time.

He walked over the Red River Bridge from Bossier and was there before eight every Saturday morning to cut the grass.  Though maids in the employ of three adjoining family households walked into my grandparents’ kitchen with impunity as part of the patriarchal commune in which I was raised, Penn never did.  It was part of a subtle hierarchy between indoor and outdoor workers, between respectable domestic servants and razor toting yard mowers and, it seemed, between the sacred and the secular.

Inez, Edwina, Della and even Pearly Mae, who dribbled the baking soda she used in lieu of underarm deodorant across the dining room tablecloth while serving on holidays, were churchgoers.  Penn accepted a ride halfway back to Bossier around three every Saturday afternoon, the halfway point being a store he patronized called “Thrifty Liquor.”  Occasionally, barely over the water running in the kitchen sink and the drowsy murmur of northwest Louisiana houseflies on an August afternoon, we’d hear the maids singing “What A Friend We Have In Jesus.”  I once heard Penn chanting out his yard raking rhythm with “I'm goin’ to Bossier City and get my hambone boiled / These Shreveport womens have let my hambone spoil.”

No, Penn did not come in the house.  The maid took his lunch out to a concrete bench under a big mimosa in the back yard, laid it down, and maybe, if she was in a liberal frame of mind, rang a bell by the back door to get his attention and let him know the meal was there.  Outside of the ice tea that accompanied lunch, he drank from garden taps connected to a well so sulfurous as to be questionable in its potability.  For other facilities, he must have used the grape arbor where we rarely trod and willpower.

It was accepted gospel in that time and place that blacks made better biscuits and cornbread than white people, but that they’d take store-bought white bread over either one, given the chance.  The reason was that they got good at making cornbread and biscuits through considerable practice with the materials within their meager budgets, budgets that rarely stretched to include much that was already prepared by others.  Often, we ate what was, a few years later, referred to as “soul food” while our domestic employees of color disdained such fare entirely, opting instead for anything canned, frozen or otherwise distant from what they ate at home.  These were still the days of $20 a week and “totin’ privileges” for maids in Louisiana.

Penn got corn bread or biscuits with his lunch, never store bread, and I don’t think anyone ever inquired as to his ‘druthers on the matter.

Thrifty Liquor was at Shreve City, a strip mall billed for years as the Pelican State’s largest shopping center.  Often, we’d schedule trips to the stores there or nearby around Saturday afternoons, since we were going to take Penn to Thrifty anyway.  Once, my mother had to visit her bookie, probably to gamble more than Penn made for a day’s hard labor on an LSU football game, and the bookie was in Bossier City, so we offered Penn a ride all the way home, but he declined, being a creature of habit, and Thrifty habit at that.

We dropped him off at the liquor store and drove on across the Red River Bridge into Bossier, glancing down as usual to spot whirlpools in the ochre gruel that separated Shreveport from Bossier after traveling from the foothills of the Rockies and forming most of the Texas – Oklahoma border.  An hour later, after a quick transaction with the bookie and stop by Barksdale Air Force Base to chat with a colonel’s wife, we passed Penn again, just trudging into the blacktop lane where his home must have been, clutching tight to a paper bag twisted around the neck of a bottle.

My aunt left Shreveport in the mid-‘50s, working for the UN in Tokyo, then for a Manhattan financier.  Like many people faced with exorbitant Yankee rents, she found a roommate and, indeed, kept the habit of roommate lifestyle from that point on.  In 1962 or so, she brought her roommate, a proper product of New Jersey and Rhode Island, South for the first time.  Met at the airport by relatives dressed for the occasion (I don’t know what the mode of dress would have been at that time; it was Jackie Kennedy pillbox hats and elbow-length white gloves for the ladies in 1999) and glad to have company, my aunt and her friend were ridden past some of the town’s sights before pulling up in my grandmother’s driveway.

Now that was a large yard, boasting three pecan trees and a crabapple tree, a side porch shielded from casual observation by a tall hedge and a produce garden on the house’s other flank, and the house itself was of the columned Neo-Grecian design Southerners gravitate to whenever possible.  Penn had been shopping shortly before the prodigal aunt’s visit home and found a great deal on a VMI cadet uniform.  It was sized correctly, a young student’s physique approximating Penn’s diminutive frame closely, and the gold braid and frogging appealed to his gaudier instincts.  That it gave the impression of being household livery when beheld in that setting by a Northern visitor was just lagniappe.

Penn died in the early ’80s after working in my relatives’ yards for half a century.  As in all families, argument quickly ensued concerning the deceased’s estate.  Which of his children and neighbors ended up with the gold teeth that comprised all of his valuable earthly belongings?  Why, the one that remembered that razor in Penn’s sock, of course.