I scanned the front page of the Indianapolis Star, which was all about Donatella Batlisch, she of the firestorm, the one who had struck the match. She was the president’s nominee to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, and someone had dug up her master’s thesis, which highlighted the “range of instruments available under existing law” to punish investment companies that trade in plantation profit. Then Batlisch gave an interview, Time or U.S. News, one of those, refusing to disavow her views, saying only that she’d discharge the duties of the office without prejudice. And then the president, an avowed “centrist” on the Old Question-as you had to be to get to be president-had surprised everybody by declining to withdraw her nomination.
Is this a watershed moment? said the page 1 editorial I was staring at now, chewing on my bagel. Is this a moment when things begin to change?
“No,” I said to the paper. “It’s not.” I took another bite. I turned the page.
A girl came in, a white girl in blue jeans and a blue-jean jacket and massively scuffed black Doc Martens-type shoes. She had an oversize leather pocketbook, this young lady, and as I watched she began casually dropping items into the bag’s big maw. This little white lady needed to refine her thievery skills, that was for sure. With each act of petty pilferage she looked first right and then left, like a cartoon mouse about to grab a hunk of cheese, before dropping whatever it was-a banana, a single-serving box of muesli-into the big purse.
A hotel man came in, khaki pants and polo shirt, treading silently enough on the thick carpeting to escape the girl’s attention-although I, a great noticer of small sounds, heard him fine. He waited, watching, arms folded across his chest, as the girl helped herself to one of the paper cups stacked beside the coffee machine and began to fill it with the two-percent milk meant for cereal.
“Miss?” he said suddenly, loudly. “May I help you?”
“What?” The woman turned quickly, jerked the paper cup from the milk dispenser, sloshed some over the sides. “No. No, you’re fine. I’m good. Thanks.”
The hotel man walked over to her, brisk and self-important in his slacks and magenta shirt with CROSSROADS HOTEL sewn on the breast pocket. I turned my eyes back to my newspaper, studied the headlines. The Batlisch hearings. The Pacers win a close one. Wilmington joins Syracuse and Detroit in bankruptcy, and what cities will be next?
“The food set out for breakfast is intended for use during the breakfast hour only.”
“Oh-wait.” The girl tried on a smile, looked around. She couldn’t even figure out a lie for it. “I mean, yes. Oh. Of course.”
The man studied her. “I’m sorry-would you remind me what room you are staying in?” He had that voice that hotel managers must learn in hotel-manager school, smooth and fussy and disapproving. The girl’s smile was flickering, fading.
“Ah. Okay,” she said. She fiddled with a barrette she had in her hair, a bright yellow butterfly. “I’m not-I’m not remembering right this second.”
“Well, perhaps if you showed me your key card?”
The manager’s clipped-on name tag said MR. PAULSEN, but I already knew his name. I recognized him, a gleaming bald scalp and small features-too small for his big head-that made him look blandly sinister. He was the guy who’d checked me in yesterday, given me my key card, and had me sign the register for “guests of color.” “Just go ahead and jot down your full name and date of birth and Social Security number, if you don’t mind.” Giving me the old standby, “It’s the corporate policy, but if it were up to me…” I didn’t take offense. I was very used to it. I stayed at a lot of hotels.
“Okay, so…I don’t have a key card,” the white girl was saying, shifting from foot to foot on her big shoes. “See, so, we are staying here, or I mean, we are going to be.” Before the first of the we’s she stumbled, just a little bit.
“I’m sorry?” said Paulsen. “You’re going to be staying here?”
I was paying close attention, half hidden behind the paper, eating my bagel. It was a novelty, I suppose, hearing that kind of petty authoritarian bullying, that ugly, half-threatening tone, used against a white person. She was a small thing, this young lady, girlish in her form and her face, with warm brown circles for eyes and thin pink lips and a lot of messy brown hair pinned up with the plastic yellow butterfly. And here’s this manager hectoring, and the woman just nodding like a schoolkid taking a scolding, tears coming into her eyes and her cheeks flushing and her eyes slowly widening.
“Yeah. See, okay, I’m up from Evansville. For the job fair. Medical job fair? You know? I’m a-I was a medical assistant. A home health aide, actually. I’m looking for a new, uh-whatever. The point is, my sister said her place was cool to crash, but then I guess her boyfriend is around or-I don’t know. Something or other.” She grinned, sheepish, at Paulsen, who moved not a muscle on his face. Gave her nothing. “Sorry. Too much information, right? But I’m gonna need the room tonight, swear to God.” She shrugged, smiled one more time. “Room comes with breakfast, right?”
“Breakfast is complimentary, yes. And you will be entitled to one once you are a guest.”
Other guests had filled the dining area: a pair of pale businessmen, overweight and ruddily jowled, napkins tucked into dress shirts; a trio of college-age kids, all girls, in long prairie skirts, looking like evangelicals. Everyone working hard at not noticing the showdown at the buffet line. And then there was a little boy, tugging on my sleeve. I looked down at him, and he grinned up at me. “Hey. What’s that say?”
The boy was black. Face full of happy mischief, round cheeks, skin a handsome high yellow, eyes deep, beautiful pools. His shirt had a picture of Captain America on it. He had scooted in next to my elbow and was trying to read the front page, upside down. The situation came into sharp focus, all at once: the white woman’s “we,” Mr. Paulsen giving her the business. Young white mother with her black son, trying to live in the world. This world.
“You couldn’t, like, front me a breakfast?” she was saying. “Like, advance it to me?”
“No,” said Mr. Paulsen. “Our policy does not allow for that,” the word policy like a gate coming down, and the next thing would be I am afraid I will have to call security if…
Her son, meanwhile, who was maybe six or seven, had eased up beside me with no reservations and was peering at my paper, up on his tiptoes. “What word’s that?”
“Controversy,” I told him. Pointed to the capital C.
He nodded. “Oh.” Bothering me without qualm, the brave, sweet boy. I wondered that nobody had told him not to talk to strangers. Maybe black strangers were okay. The kid moved his mouth, squinting at the word. “Controversy.”
“Ma’am. If you please…”
“Hey, you know what? It’s fine.”
Slowly and with exaggerated dignity the white girl removed her contraband from her pocketbook: three muffins, one by one; the cereal box; the banana and two oranges; then two plastic spoons and a yogurt. These items she placed in a line along the buffet table, like sacrificial offerings, while her nemesis in his magenta shirt stood with arms crossed.
And as she came over to my table to retrieve her son, the girl caught my eye and gave me this fleeting, rueful look, the meaning perfectly clear: “This guy, huh? What a dickhead.”
It is a marker of the kind of relationship I had with white people in general and with white women in particular-having to do not only with the caution that adheres to my profession but also with my upbringing, the way I was raised-that I did not return her look. I made myself busy, reaching across the table for a fresh napkin, and while I was busy she scooped up her boy and bore him away, the front section of my Star dangling from his forefingers across her back like a cape.