Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 148

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years, her rival and judge; and her housekeepers, Florida Evans and
Mrs. Naugatuck, her subordinates.
When Maude was not seeking out conflict, Louise Jefferson, a nextdoor neighbor of the Bunkers, was attempting to deflate the
gargantuan ego of her husband George, an African-American version
of Archie. In 1975 George and Louise moved from Queens to a deluxe
apartment on Manhattan's fashionable East Side. Their show, "The
Jefferson's," another direct spin-off of "All in the Family," fwrtrayed
an upper middle class African-American family who had worked
hard and prospered. George, Archie's mirror image in black, made
his fortune from a chain of dry cleaning stores. He was sustained by
his capable and open-minded wife, Louise. Like Edith Bunker, Louise
played the long-suffering "little woman," who came to George's
rescue and often played his alter ego. As is frequently the case of a
well-taken-care-of wife, she occasionally did volunteer work and
received expensive gifts from her husband. On one show, she was so
worried about George's reaction to her independence, that she asked
his permission to put together a cookbook.
On occasion, however, Louise exhibited a strength and autonomy
that would come to characterize the new woman of the seventies. She
drew an outside world of blacks and whites alike to her home and
remained loving but undeterred by George's loudly voiced opposition
(Taylor 80). An example of this is the episode in which George and
Louise decide to renew their wedding vows. When Louise teams that
George is overcharging his customers in the Harlem store, she refuses
to go through with the ceremony. George finally agrees to cut his
Harlem prices ten percent; Louise then relents and says "I do." The
point is made; Louise helps George to realize that he has a special
obligation to the people who cannot afford the high prices he has
been charging.
While the Jeffersons were members of the nouveau riche, Louise
never forgot her roots. In one episode, we leam that she was once
employed as a maid in order to hnance her husband's first cleaning
establishment. In another, she returned to her childhood home, a
tenement building about to be tom down. A glass doorknob reminds her
of an old room, where she, as a young girl, dreamed about her future.
Although her family did not have material things, they did have
peace. Louise ultimately discovers that the present or the future