‘Every Day’s a Battle’ : Old Family Cafe Cooking on Pride, Determination

It was just after 9:30 a.m. when Dorothy Clements arrived at her cafe, the Auburn Avenue Rib Shack, housed in a white, concrete-block building in the heart of Atlanta’s battered Sweet Auburn business district.

She was not in a good mood. Money was on her mind. She was late for work and the weather looked bad for business. Those dark clouds overhead spelled sure-enough rain.

“Thursdays are always such iffy days anyway,” she said. “Sometimes they’re bad, sometimes they’re good. You never can predict.”

“Money’s always on my mind on workdays, from the minute I get up,” she said. “In a business like mine, every day’s a battle with the buck--trying to get it and trying to keep it.”

Hundreds of thousands of owners of small businesses across America know that feeling.

Dorothy Clements’ business is a small restaurant and carryout place on a traditionally black business strip just east of downtown Atlanta. Like most other businesses there--barbers, beauticians, florists, record shops--hers is locked in a never-ending struggle for economic survival.

When her father, A. J. Taylor, opened the Rib Shack in the early 1960s, Auburn Avenue was a showcase of black entrepreneurial genius, with black-owned banks, insurance companies, office buildings, real estate firms and newspapers. But when the rest of Atlanta was opened to blacks by the desegregation of the late 1960s, businesses and patrons moved out of Sweet Auburn in droves, leaving the neighborhood economy devastated.

Nowadays, the thoroughfare is best known for landmarks associated with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.--the house where he was born, the church where he was co-pastor with his father, the crypt where he is buried. The businesses that remain in the area fight the odds just to keep their doors open.

“Most of the time I don’t feel like a business person at all,” said Clements, who is 50. “I feel like the little Dutch boy, trying to plug up the holes in the dike with his fingers.”

Because she had overslept by more than an hour that morning--a rare occurrence--she had been worried that she might have to deal with problems the moment she walked through the door. But at the restaurant--a well-worn but tidy place with just three booths and three stools along a short dining counter--she was relieved to find everything going smoothly. As the jukebox pounded out a bouncy accompaniment, the staff was busily preparing for the 11:30 a.m. opening.

Ozzie Williams, the tall, smiling barbecue chef, was in the cookhouse just off the dining room, mixing the cole slaw and potato salad and tending to the slabs of ribs that were sizzling to a delicious brown over a hickory fire.

Daisy Stinson, the pert, blond-streaked cook, and Louise Luke, her vivacious assistant, bustled over an array of pots and pans in the open kitchen behind the dining counter, preparing the rest of the fare on the day’s menu: Brunswick stew, neck bones, boiled cabbage, candied yams, pinto beans, fried okra, corn bread and peach cobbler.

With them in the cramped kitchen was Clements’ mother, Mary Taylor, a somber, slightly built woman in her late 60s. She stirred the huge pots of barbecue sauce that bubbled on the range and filled the air with a pungent, spicy aroma.

Runs Own Errands

After an approving glance at the morning’s preparations, Clements went to her cluttered cubbyhole of an office in the back of the restaurant, pulled off her scarf and began going over the errands she needed to do--the morning bank run, an appointment to straighten out a meat bill, stops at the wholesale grocer’s and the supermarket.

She also reminded herself that the plumber was supposed to come in to fix the hot-water taps in the restrooms--that could run into some money. And the wood man probably would be back to collect for the half-cord of hickory he had dropped off before she arrived. That would be another $60 to $65.

“It’s always money for this, money for that,” she said, “and look at that weather out there. What if it rains all weekend? I swear, you can’t get ahead in this business for just trying to stay in place.”

By the time she arrived at the bank, the first stop on her list, around 10 a.m., a steady drizzle had begun to fall. The drive to the bank, a branch office across town on the west side, had taken 20 minutes on the slippery, traffic-clogged roads. There are banks closer to Auburn Avenue, but Clements uses the one her father and mother patronized because it was near their home. Loyalty to family tradition is one of Clements’ strongest traits.

“Practically everybody here knows me and my mother and knew my father, and that comes in handy in business,” she said. “Sometimes you have to write a check and then rush to the bank to cover it.”

There were smiles and greetings all around as she came into the building. Her business was brief. She chatted with the receptionist, deposited the previous night’s receipts and got $51 in change for the day’s operations, and dropped off a sympathy card for a bank officer whose grandmother had died.

“I like to keep up good relations,” she said. “Every now and then, for instance, I’ll bring them some rib sandwiches. Like I tell Ozzie, the barbecue cook, if I can’t dazzle them with my charm, I’ll bribe them with my barbecue.”

When she took over the Auburn Avenue Rib Shack after her father’s death five years ago, Clements knew little about running a restaurant.

“Bookkeeping had been my occupation almost from the first job I had after I dropped out of college,” she said. “All I knew about running a restaurant was what I learned keeping the books for one once. My father never let me work at the Rib Shack when I was growing up. You know how Southern fathers are about their daughters--he wanted to protect me from the ‘street-people’ types that came there.”

Yet it was her father’s last wish, as he lay dying of leukemia in an Atlanta hospital, that Clements, his only child, keep the family business going.

Left New York Career

She was then living in New York and working as chief bookkeeper to a white Manhattan law firm. She had not lived in Atlanta since 1965, a few years after her marriage broke up, but she knew what the restaurant meant to her father: It had been his fondest dream. It never was much to look at, and it never made him rich, but it gave him a sense of self-worth he had never, never gotten during the 30 years he had worked for whites at a big South Side bakery.

At the Rib Shack, A. J. Taylor was boss. He gave the orders; he did the hiring and firing.

It had been a different story at the bakery, where he continued to work even after he opened the restaurant. Even though he was often called upon to train white fellow workers for supervisory positions, he never was promoted out of the rank-and-file. The company said it was because he lacked a high school diploma. He knew it was because he was black.

Three days before his death in April, 1982, talking to Clements long distance during one of her usual Sunday calls, he said: “Promise me you’ll come back.”

“I promise,” she said, without hesitating.

Now, standing behind the cash register and lending a hand with the carry-out orders, Clements said: “I’ve never regretted that decision. It hasn’t always been easy to keep, but I guess the stubbornness in me keeps me going. I want to make the Rib Shack a success.”

It was close to noon, the busiest time on weekdays, and the restaurant was in full swing. Mary Taylor, Clements’ mother, had departed, her work done. Stinson, the cook, and Luke, her assistant, were busily taking and filling orders.

Although the rain had begun to fall intermittently in heavy bursts, business was pretty good. The metal-grilled front door was banging open and shut with encouraging regularity.

“I hope it keeps up like this,” Clements said.

Two of the three booths were occupied, a party of four in one and a party of two in the other. Two customers were sitting at the counter, and there were four or five people waiting for carry-out orders.

“I’d say 90% of our business is carry-out,” Clements said. “As you can see,” she added, casting a disparaging eye over the booths and stools, “we can’t seat a whole lot of people.”

Many White Patrons

Among the patrons were almost as many whites as blacks. The Rib Shack is perhaps the only Auburn Avenue business that steadily draws a white crowd.

“If it weren’t for my white customers, I’d probably have to close up,” she said. “I couldn’t make a living on blacks alone--especially those who’ve gotten so big they don’t remember their roots and never come back to poor ol’ Auburn Avenue anymore, except during the King holiday week.”

Most days, after making sure that the lunch business was off to a good start, Clements would grab a bite for herself and drive back to her apartment to take a short nap and work on the books. Then, around 3:30, she would return to the restaurant.

But on this afternoon, she had a 12:30 appointment at the meat wholesalers. “I think they’ve overcharged me for the ribs we got for the big Auburn Avenue street festival a week or so ago,” she said. “I originally placed an order for four days of meat, but I cut it back to three later because the festival was kind of slow.”

While she was out, she would also swing by the wholesale grocer’s for carryout containers and buttermilk for tomorrow’s corn bread, and then by the supermarket to pick up crust shells for tomorrow’s dessert, lemon pie.

“We get our ribs and the other meats delivered,” she said. “Also our produce, but all the rest of the purchases I usually pick up myself. It saves money, because you pay extra for delivery. Anyway, with business so up and down, the way it’s been over the past year, we’re just operating on a day-by-day basis.”

As she pulled away from the curb in the battered, white 1972 Buick Electra--her father’s old car--Clements reminisced about Auburn Avenue:

“I grew up just a few blocks north of here, in what is known as the Old 4th Ward,” she said. “We attended church at Ebenezer Baptist, and on Sundays, after services, my cousin and I used to love to walk up and down the street. Auburn Avenue was swingin’ in those days!”

Periodically, there is talk in Atlanta of revitalizing the old shops and houses along Auburn, and restoring the neighborhood as a symbol of its one-time economic power.

“That’s usually around election time,” Clements said. “You can always tell when somebody’s planning to run for mayor or congressman. One of the first things he starts saying is: ‘Something must be done to bring back Auburn Avenue.’ ”

Thus far, however, the talk has generated little actual accomplishment.

“I’m thinking about going to the Small Business Administration and seeing if I can’t get some money,” Clements said. “I’ve got great ambitions for the Rib Shack. I’d like to renovate the facade, expand the seating, have a little bar with beer and wine and a little patio outdoors, and put in a whole new kitchen.

“I was actually going ahead with the idea last year, until the state transportation department came along and started putting in an off-ramp from the freeway that closed off the little parking lot on the side of the building and killed a lot of my business. My business is down almost 40% from last year.

“But I’m willing to try again. I don’t mind going into debt. You have to be adventurous in business. I’d rather say I tried, even if I didn’t make it, than not to try at all.”

It was almost 3 p.m. by the time Clements returned from her errands. The restaurant was empty and would probably be quiet until around 5 or 6.

The appointment at the wholesalers had gone well. It appeared that they agreed with her about the bill.

“They’re real nice there,” she said as she took off her rain-spattered jacket and scarf and sat down in her office. “I like dealing with them, because they’ll always give me a break if I don’t have the money to pay them right away--and believe me, when I have money, I give my business to the ones who have helped me out.”

The plumber had come and was working on the hot-water taps. She could hear him banging away on the pipes in one restroom.

She drew out a yellow note pad and began jotting down tomorrow’s menu. The special, as always on Friday, would be fried fish. There would be collard greens too.

“I meant to have collard greens today, because a lot of people like them,” she said. “A lot of people call in the morning to see what’s on the menu. That determines whether they come in to eat or not.”

Luke appeared in the doorway with the afternoon receipts and a daily cash-summary form--one of the standard bookkeeping measures Clements has introduced.

She looked at the figures without changing expression. Then, with a sigh, she said: “Well, it’s not too good. The rain did hurt us, but it’s not too bad. We’ll still be in business tomorrow.”

At 5:30, Clements got ready to call it a day and go home. Sarah Jackson, the sole night employee, was on duty. There were two customers, one at the counter and another in a booth.

Clements had paid the plumber and the wood man. Together, their two bills equaled a third of the afternoon’s receipts. Now, she planned to go home and watch a little television, make dinner from the leftover crab salad she had picked up at a supermarket delicatessen the day before, maybe have a glass or two of white wine with it, before bed. The mother of a grown daughter, she lives alone and rarely goes out socially after a day at work.

‘I’m Going to Make It’

“I think I’m lucky to have a business, even if it might be a little ghetto rib shack,” she said as she walked to her car. “There are not many black people who have a business that they can leave for their families, and I feel like I will survive. I’m going to make it--with this place right here on this corner.”

One thing was certain: When her head hit the pillow, money was not going to be on her mind.

“I get up in the morning thinking about it, but when I go to bed at night, I get my sleep, because I know there’s nothing I can do about it,” she said.

“And, after all, tomorrow is another day. You never know--some miracle might take place.”