They were called waiter carriers. Because
In 1879 the town council started charging these women a license tax to stand on the platform they had made famous.
Gordonsville Virginia would not hire black women at the hotel and would not hire them in the stores, then worked out how to take a cut of the only trade left to them.
They paid it and were back at the stove by four the next morning.
That is not resilience, that is somebody being charged rent on the one square foot of ground they were allowed to stand on.
She was not allowed inside the train car.
So she sold her food through the window.
That window was not a convenience and it was not a charming little detail. It was the only opening in a wall built to keep her out, and she turned it into a storefront.
Fifteen cents bought a chicken leg or a breast through it. A back or a wing went for a nickel or a dime.
This happened in Gordonsville, Virginia, a junction town where two railroads crossed.
The window opened when the first line reached the town in 1840, and it stayed open for about eighty years.
The women who worked it came from Brown Town, the Black community on the far side of the tracks.
By the town's own account the Exchange Hotel would not employ them, and neither would most of the businesses on Main Street.
Right beside the platform stood the hotel that would not have them.
They cooked in their own kitchens instead and sold in the twenty feet of open air in front of it.
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