400 Days of Oppression

XIX

The next morning, I decided to try it again. This time I lowered my expectations. I could take a waitressing job now and could always continue looking for a higher paying job that utilized my education while I was working.

I sat at the kitchen table with Kenyatta and Angela. I had slept in the shed again last night, once more relegated to slave quarters while Angela enjoyed all the comforts of home. Following my job-hunting ordeal, this second insult, and the idea that Kenyatta may have been fucking her was almost too much to take. I was quiet as I ate my eggs and bacon, seething in silent rage. Kenyatta tried again and again to draw me into a conversation.

“This is your last day. What did you decide to do? Are you going back to the plantation or are you going to try finding a job again?”

I didn’t answer, didn’t even look up from the plate.

“Did you hear me?”

I nodded.

“Well?”

“I’m not going back.” I still did not look at him.

“Well, good luck finding an apartment.”

I ignored the comment and kept eating. I heard Angela clear her throat to get Kenyatta’s attention. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her shake her head, trying to signal Kenyatta to back off. She could clearly sense that I was about to lose it.

“Well, I’m off to work. Goodbye, Kitten.”

I didn’t respond. Kenyatta reached out and grabbed my plate, pulling it away from me. With his other hand he seized my jaw and tilted my head up, trying to force me to look at him. I kept my eyes averted.

“I said, Goodbye! Look at me!”

I looked at him with all the hate I could muster. I was angry, and I wanted him to know that, but he would also know I didn’t hate him. My love was so much stronger than any anger I felt toward him. I met his eyes.

“It’s almost over, Kitten. Hang in there. You’ve been through too much to let this break you.”

And he was right of course. I had been through too much. This shouldn’t have been that bad after all I’d suffered, but it was precisely because I’d suffered so much that this last part was so difficult. The way that woman looked at me when she told me there was no job and closed the door in my face. How that woman had bluntly told me she’d never hire a woman with a tattoo on her face. Kenyatta had done well. If this is how blacks felt, the prejudice they encountered when they were trying to find a job to feed themselves and their families, it was no wonder so many turned to crime or languished on public assistance. This was completely demoralizing.

“You still want to be my wife?” Kenyatta said.

All the anger in me diminished instantly at the prospect.

“Y-yes, of course. Of-of course I do,” I said. An unexpected tear raced from my eye and Kenyatta leaned in and kissed it away. He kissed both eyelids, kissed my forehead, then planted one, long, soulful kiss on my lips that made my knees weak.

“Good luck today, Kitten. I love you.”

“I love you too, Kenyatta,” I replied.

I felt better, more resolved. As Kenyatta walked out the door, I was already preparing myself to do battle in the job market. Then Angela spoke up and ruined everything.

“You’re a fool, you know that right?”

“Angela, don’t.” I held up a hand to silence her.

“He’s playing you. You know you’re not the first white woman he’s done this to?”

I looked at her in shock.

“He didn’t tell you? You’re not the first, but you have come the farthest. Most quit in the box. He’s had to get real creative to keep challenging you. He never expected you to make it this far.”

I shook my head.

“I don’t believe you.”

But what she was saying made sense. Why would I have been the first? Did I think I was the first white woman he’d ever dated? Did I think I was the first one he’d ever loved?

“Did he ever tell you about the first white woman he ever fell in love with? What he did to her family?”

I shook my head. I didn’t think I wanted to hear this.

“She told him she couldn’t see him because her parents were prejudice, so Kenyatta took a knife, went to her house, and killed them both. He stabbed the girl’s mother about twenty times and her father more than fifty. He slit the man’s throat so deep he almost decapitated him. He was only fourteen so he was tried as a juvenile and declared insane. They put him in a mental institution until he was an adult. On his twenty-first birthday, he was released and his juvenile record was sealed. He killed two people and walked out of there with a clean record.”

My hands shook as I stood up and began clearing the breakfast dishes. I didn’t know what to think. How could Kenyatta have killed someone? It didn’t make sense. But the real problem was that it made too much sense. It answered too many questions.

I slammed the dishes down in the sink, shattering them.

“Why the fuck are you telling me this now? Why didn’t you say something before?”

Angela stood up and tried to put her arms around me. I pushed her away.

“Why now? Answer me!”

“Because you might make it. I never thought you would before, but you might make it. And marrying him would be the biggest mistake of your life. Kenyatta doesn’t love you. He doesn’t know how to love anyone. All he’s got inside him is hate. He wants everyone, every white person, to feel the pain he felt when he was rejected at fourteen. That’s what he’s in this for, and it won’t stop when this is over. It won’t stop when you get a ring on your finger. You need to think about this, girl.”

And I did. I thought about it while I walked to the bus stop. I thought about it as I rode the bus to the BART train. I thought about it as I took BART to Market Street and even while I walked up Market to my first job interview. It was all I could think about. Had all this been for nothing? Was Angela just saying all that because she wanted him to herself? But that didn’t make sense. Angela was a lesbian. That could have been bullshit though. She was definitely bi, but just because she liked pussy didn’t mean she didn’t also love dick.

The interview was for a job as a waitress at a diner on Market and Church Street. I tilted my head back, lifted my chin, and marched in. The diner was designed to look like the dining car of an old train. Being in San Francisco, there was every possibility that it had once been. It was green and black with little green shades on the windows with gold tassels. Every seat was filled and the waitresses looked harried but competent as they hurried up and down the aisles taking and delivering food orders. I could easily imagine myself among them. It would actually be a relief to have a job, for once, that ended when you clocked out. No tests or papers to grade or assignments to plan. No stressing over some complicated lesson plan or student issue. Just take the order and bring the food. No thought involved. It would be a relief.

I walked up to the cash register and put on my brightest smile.

“Hi. I’m here to apply for the waitress position.”

The woman behind the counter had thick blonde curls and bright red lipstick. She dressed in a tight cream-colored cashmere sweater and a black poodle skirt with a red kitten on it, like she stepped off the set of Happy Days. But she was much too young to have ever seen the show, except perhaps in reruns. There was some odd combination of smile and frown on her face that was supposed to be sexy, judging from the way she stood with one hand on her hip, breasts thrust out prominently, twirling her gum around her finger and winking at customers as they walked in.

“Um, okay. Have you ever waitressed before?” she said, glancing my way only long enough to pass me an application before she resumed smiling and winking at customers. She even flirted with the gay couples.

“No...um...not really.”

She turned and looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time.

“Is that permanent?” she said, gesturing toward my face, with a dismissive flip of the wrist. I wanted to grab her by the hair and slam her face into the cash register. Instead, I willed myself to hold that fake smile on my face like it was chained to me.

“No. It only lasts two or three weeks.”

She looked me up and down then turned to blow a kiss at an old man I assumed was a regular. He returned the gesture, beaming from ear to ear.

“We might still be hiring in three weeks,” she said, without ever turning back to look at me. I stood there for nearly a full minute, during which she never looked at me again. Finally, I walked out of the little diner, refusing to cry, determined not to give up. I caught a bus to Haight Street and walked down to the Lower Haight district where there were quirky little shops and bars that were used to people with odd tattoos and piercings.

There was a bar called The Mad Wolf that had advertised for a cocktail waitress. It was right in the middle of the block. The kind of bar with saloon doors, pool tables, dart boards, and a sparse smattering of lonely drunks, having their first drink of the day when most people were still digesting their Froot Loops.

I walked up to the bar. The guy behind it was a big, six-foot, urban redneck/punk in a black cowboy hat, a black Sex Pistols t-shirt with the sleeves torn off, black jeans, and black combat boots with spurs on them. He had gray hair and crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and lips. He was old enough to have seen Sid Vicious live.

“What’s up?”

“I’m here about the cocktail waitress job?”

“What’s the tattoo for?”

“It’s a long story.”

He leaned over the bar and locked eyes with me.

“If you want to work here, I think I need to hear it.”

“Basically, my boyfriend wanted me to see if I could get a job looking like this.”

His eyes remained fixed on me, and his expression was deadpan. I felt so uncomfortable under his gaze that I almost turned and left.

“Ever worked in a bar before?” he said finally.

“No. I was a schoolteacher. I taught seventh grade English.”

“But you couldn’t teach kids with ‘Slut’ and ‘Liar’ tattooed on your face, so you’re slumming at a bar, hoping my standards are low enough to hire you?”

I smiled and nodded.

“I guess so.”

“Well. You’re in luck. My standards are just that low. Welcome to the Mad Wolf!”

He spread his arms wide and gestured around the nearly empty bar.

“Thanks!” I said, a little too energetically.

“It pays nine dollars plus tips. Most girls make a hundred a night in tips. Two hundred on the busy nights. That okay?”

“That sounds perfect.”

I reached across the bar and shook his hand then turned to leave, but he didn’t let go.

“You in a hurry? Let me show you around the bar.”

He stroked my arm with his other hand and I quickly snatched my hand away.

“I...um...I—”

He smiled a wide predatory smile.

“Let me show you where we keep all the kegs and the cases of beer.” He leaned close enough for me to smell the marijuana and beer on his breath. “We’ve got a bed back there.”

“No. I don’t think so,” I said.

“Come on. Why not? I told you I’d hire you.”

“So I’m supposed to fuck you for a job?”

He sneered at me.

“You’re the whore with ‘Slut’ tattooed on your forehead,” he said.

“Fuck you!” I yelled. My voice echoed in the near empty bar. A few of the drunks laughed. The others barely looked up from their drinks.

“Fucking asshole!” I flipped him the bird over my shoulder as I stormed out.

“You’re fired!” he yelled back and then I heard him laugh. His laughter was worse than any insult he could have hurled at me. I wanted to crawl in a hole and die.

I stormed out of the bar. That was it. The last straw. Fuck this. I walked back to the bus stop. I was done. I had a decision to make. I could either go back to the plantation, as Kenyatta suggested, or I could say fuck the whole thing, as Angela suggested.

An hour later, when I walked up the steps of Kenyatta’s home and opened the front door, I was still undecided. It was the sound of the headboard smacking the wall, the moans and screams coming from Kenyatta’s bedroom, that made up my mind.