He blinked, stunned to silence. I sat my champagne flute on a nearby table and headed back inside.
His question was another example of the “polite racism” of the New South, much like the way Black people in Atlanta coexisted around Confederate soldier statues and venues containing the words plantation and Dixie. The expectation was that such things were harmless symbols of white heritage. They weren’t. They were relics of slavery and a secessionist society that stirred hurtful messages of racism. And now, a board member wanted to know where my family’s slave owners were from. I wanted to hustle to the nearest exit and a plane back home. I’d pay for the damned ticket myself and they could keep their corporate jet.
I stepped back inside the party, where Nate was holding court with Willow and a couple other board members. He caught my eye, tinkled his glass with his Auburn University class ring, and cleared his throat.
“Everyone, let me have your attention,” Nate said. I stopped in my tracks.
A hush fell over the room as people lowered their voices. “Some of you have already met Ellice Littlejohn, our new general counsel. For those of you who haven’t, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to introduce yourselves. Ellice is a brilliant lawyer who will help us navigate Houghton into new heights of success. I am proud she has accepted the offer to lead us in all matters legal. Here’s to Ellice.”
“To Ellice!” everyone said in unison.
People cheered and clinked their glasses in a pretentious little chime, as if I had done something extraordinary. I could feel my face warm. I wasn’t sure whether it was the embarrassment or a hot flash.
*
For the rest of the party, I tried to make the best of things. But there was a disturbing undercurrent that ran through the crowd, as if people were anxious, nervous even. A few people tried to engage with me. But most of them stood off, staring at me or ignoring me altogether. I was a big girl. I could tell they didn’t want me here. The feeling was mutual.
Office gatherings like this, the need to be “on,” can be so exhausting. Smiling and pretending to enjoy the stilted conversations and awaiting the threat that someone might tell a wildly inappropriate joke with everyone looking at me for reassurance that it was okay to laugh. Once at a legal conference, I stood alongside Michael and a group of male lawyers. One of the men, red-faced and potbellied, had stood in the circle complaining about one of the female presenters during an earlier panel presentation and said, “I couldn’t tell whether she was just passionate about class action lawsuits or she was on her period.” They are all roared in laughter. I left the group. Michael followed behind me, trying to explain that’s just the way guys talk. That boys-will-be-boys bullshit. It was like I was invisible to them.
I scanned the room again. The so-called New South wasn’t very different from the “Old South”—me and the waitstaff, the only people of color. Surely, this couldn’t be normal in the twenty-first century. I caught the eye of one of the waiters, a Black woman, about my age, dressed in black slacks and shirt, white apron, and a pair of dark Skechers speckled with the stains of a dozen parties before this one. Her eyes were vacant and cold, as she served patê and lamb pops on a silver tray. There but for the grace of God go I. Deep down, I knew I could be the one in the white apron passing trays if I had been born a few years earlier or if I had never escaped Chillicothe. She extended the tray in my direction. I gave a warm smile and nodded at her. A habit mostly. My small way of saying, I might mingle with them, but I’m still down with my tribe. She returned my warm greeting with the same stone face she gave every other guest at the party. Obviously, she wasn’t buying my I’m-part-of-the-tribe crap. Or maybe she’d worked too many of these kinds of parties, witness to the excesses and trivialities of its guests—both Black and white—and she was just too tired to care about making me feel better about me.
I chalked this party up to another example of my being “too Black” for one group of people here and “not Black enough” for the other. I left the party in search of the bathroom to take a respite. I crossed the foyer and walked down the hall where I heard the voices of men arguing. The men were holed up in a room across the hall from the bathroom. I stood outside the door for a moment.
“I gave him one fucking job to do and he screwed that up!”
Jonathan?
The other voice, southern, twangy: “Can we talk about Libertad for a minute? I don’t think Libertad should be a part of this. It’s too risky. Everything could be exposed.”