400 Days of Oppression (25 page)

I hailed a taxi, gave the man the address and sank into the back seat, hiding my face and trying to avoid eye contact with the driver or do anything else that might encourage conversation. It was a wasted effort.

“What’s that on your face?” the driver said. He was a young Nigerian man with a thick accent. I didn’t look up to read his name badge on the dashboard of his car. I didn’t want to give him a better view of my face.

He was staring at me in the rearview mirror. I looked away.

“Please keep your eyes on the road,” I responded, and we drove the rest of the way in silence.

The house was in the Berkeley Hills, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the Bay Area, comparable to Pacific Heights in San Francisco or “Specific Whites” as Kenyatta called it. The taxi driver dropped me off in front of a huge Victorian with large columns and a front porch the size of my last apartment. I approached the porch on shaky legs.

The doorbell sounded like a gong. All the moisture on my body seemed to have doubled as I waited for someone to answer. The door swung wide and an elegant woman in her forties wearing a Chanel pants suit, stood in the doorway, smiling wide in welcome. Her smile quickly fell from her face and all the joy left her eyes.

“May I help you?”

“Hi, I’m Natasha Talusa. I called about the position.”

I held out my hand and the woman looked at it like it was something that had floated up from a toilet.

“I’m sorry, the position has been filled,” she said and closed the door, leaving me standing on the front porch with my hand still outstretched, the fake smile still on my face. I turned and walked off the porch, sobbing. I had no idea what I was going to do.

I hit the two other jobs with similar results. At the university, the woman conducting the interview started laughing when she saw me.

“You’ve got to be kidding me? Did someone put you up to this?”

“No ma’am I—”

“This is a joke, right? Who put you up to this? One of the girls?”

“No ma’am. I have a degree in childhood education. I have an English degree. I worked for the San Francisco school district for five years—”

“Stop. Let me stop you right there. Sweetie, I cannot hire a woman with tattoos all over her face, no matter how many degrees you have. I’m sorry, but there’s just no way you can teach children with ‘Thief,’ ‘Addict,’ ‘Criminal,’ and…does that say ‘Slut’? There's just no way.”

“I understand. Thank you for your time.”

I walked out feeling lower than I ever had at any other time in the experiment. The obstacle Kenyatta had set before me this time was impossible. I rode the BART train back home in tears. What the hell was I going to do? Kenyatta wanted me out of the house in twenty-four hours.

I made it back to Kenyatta’s home ten hours after I left that morning. Kenyatta was there waiting for me, as was Angela.

“How did it go?”

“This is impossible! No one will hire me like this. I can’t get a job. So how am I supposed to get an apartment?”

Kenyatta leaned forward and stroked my hair then put a hand on my cheek.

“Then do what tens of thousands of freed slaves did before you. Go back to the plantation.”

C
HAPTER
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.”