We walked out the store and stood on the sidewalk silent for a beat. Racism is exhausting and embarrassing, even in front of your best friend, who’s also Black. It’s as if there’s a stealth undercurrent of unwarranted assumptions, petty slights, and dismissals always ready to pop up and reinforce the idea that people of color aren’t good enough, they aren’t welcome. The reality was that I earned enough money in one day to pay a week of her wages. But still, she felt entitled enough to conclude that I couldn’t afford to buy a dress she was paid by the hour to sell.
“So how was the party yesterday?” Grace asked, shifting the conversation.
“You mean the one they had the day after their colleague’s funeral?” I shook my head at the poor timing of the party. “Fine, I guess.”
“You guess?”
We strolled down the street again, but I’d lost my interest in window shopping after our little reception at the Port. “Well, for starters, it was a work function, so anything resembling fun was in very limited supply there.”
Grace snickered.
“But it was something else. They have this party exactly one day after Michael’s funeral and not one of them attended. Maybe it was my imagination. I don’t know. It was a vibe I caught while I was there.”
“Like what?”
“Well, as usual, I was the only one, if you don’t count the waitstaff. But more than that, it was like a few people there had these staged phony facades while the majority of them shot daggers at me.”
“But you’ve said before we don’t have a lot of cousins at Houghton.”
“True. But something about this party was different. Some of the people acted like I was the first Black person they’d ever been in the same room with. You remember that scene in the movie Get Out, where the brother walks into the garden party and all the white people fawn all over him all weird and everything? Yeah, it was kinda like that, except the folks weren’t fawning over me and they weren’t as sophisticated. And the VP of Operations, Maxwell Lumpkin, essentially told me he wouldn’t send work to me. His vibe came through loud and clear.”
“Oooh . . . he sounds delightful. Ell, how did you manage to find the one company in all of Atlanta without Black people in the upper ranks?”
“You’d be surprised how few Black people there are in the executive ranks of major companies. It’s getting better, but we still have a long way to go.”
“Okay, so what’s up with all the protests against Houghton that they show on the news?”
“That’s what made me take the job. Maybe now that I’m there, I can help change all that. I have a plan to work with HR, help them get some initiatives and policies in place to hire more of our cousins.”
“Good luck. I just think the hate up in there must run pretty deep if they’ve managed to keep their executive suite lily white in a city with a Black mayor for the past forty years and one of them is named Keisha.”
I laughed out loud. “You might have a point there. Michael used to assure me that the company was working on it, but being family-owned and all, it was taking more time than usual.” I stopped talking. I never liked to talk too much about Michael to Grace. We stood at the corner waiting for the traffic light to change.
“Can I ask you something and you promise not to get mad?” Grace said.
“Oh God, what?”
“Why would you follow your boss over to a company with an abysmal record for hiring minorities and then continue to stay there after someone killed that boss?”
Grace’s question was a good one, but I deflected again. “Did I mention the thirty-five percent raise?”
Grace tilted her head and gave me a lopsided girl-please kind of smirk, fully aware of what I was doing. “Ell, you were sleeping with Michael, weren’t you?”
The light changed and we stepped off the curb. I hooked my arm inside hers. “Come on. Let’s go find a store that doesn’t mind taking green cash from Black people.”
Chapter 10
The promotion to head up the Legal Department was like almost every other thing in my life—a cruel irony of blessings. I finally get the job I’ve craved, and it comes at the cost of a man’s life, a man I was sleeping with. I finally reach a pinnacle in my career, but I didn’t have a say in it. God was speaking to me in some kind of way. I just wished I understood what He was saying.
Grace and I parted ways after shopping and I headed to the only person with whom I shared everything, good and bad. I went to visit Vera. Depending on the kind of day she was having, she might not understand my good news. But just being around her was always plenty enough for me.