Blue Collar Blues

by Rosalyn McMillan

  Bonnie was silent.

  “Were they lovers, Bonnie?”

  “Yes.” She stopped, and began collecting Tomiko’s clothes off the sofa. “For nearly five years.”

  Bonnie began hanging Tomiko’s clothes, leaving out the outfit she would wear to her appointment. Once she was finished, she began to tell Tomiko a little about R.C. and Khan. All the while she talked, she continued to do her housework. After all, she was on a schedule and she had shopping to do this afternoon.

  Before long, Tomiko knew all she needed to about Khan. She told herself it really didn’t matter. The bottom line was that R.C. had married her and not Khan.

  While Bonnie removed the sheets from the bed, Tomiko hung on to every word. Afterwards, Bonnie sat down on the edge of the bed to take a short break. They were just about to get to the best part, Tomiko thought: what Khan looked like.

  “Can’t say she wasn’t pretty. She was. Blond hair and all, ’cepting she had one of those looks like Buckwheat on the Little Rascals,” Bonnie said, “and the cutesy facial expressions of Darla.”

  “Who’s Buckwheat?” Tomiko asked.

  “I forgot—you don’t know. Anyway, Buckwheat’s hairstyle was the seventies Afro. The Afro was the black man’s secret weapon then because the black man had hair. Afro Sheen used to come in colors. Black Mist would make women follow a man around. Afros gave the black man back his self-esteem. And that made the black man fine in the seventies. But later on in that decade, they came out with the super ’fro. That’s what turned all the ladies’ heads—even the white ones. If the Jackson Five had had Quovadises, nobody would have noticed them. The super Afros were it then. They made men look fine even if they were ugly.”

  Tomiko and Bonnie laughed together. If there was one thing she knew about, even in Japan, it was the Jackson Five. “I love this, Bonnie. I’ve never learned about black people before. They’re so racist in Japan. No one speaks of them except to insult. Please don’t stop.”

  Bonnie smoothed back the loose strands of her fire-red hair and smiled. “Next it was the TWA: the teeny-weeny Afros. Then there were the men who wore hats like Marvin Gaye and Sidney Poitier. Sidney’s hair has been the same length since nineteen sixty.”

  “R.C.’s got a TWA.” Tomiko glanced at his photo on the nightstand.

  “And I imagine he’s had it about fifty years, too.”

  The two women laughed.

  “I’ve got to rent you some movies so you know what I’m talking about. In the days of the TWA, no black man sat in first class on an airline. Well, Sidney Poitier was first class. But Bill Cosby could never sit in first class, because in those days, he had an Afro. And that was when porkchop sideburns were in style. With those looks first-class passengers would stare at him, maybe think he was a radical or something. Even if he was famous, they’d probably not recognize him, seeing as he was black.

  “Anyway, the same bald-headed man in the sixties became your husband in the seventies. And that’s when my generation came into the picture. The women like me with thick nappy hair got tired of Mama sitting by the stove, spitting on the pressing comb. The thicker the oil, the nappier our hair. We suffered then. Our small children suffered, too, when we combed their hair. They cried for hours.”

  Tomiko noticed that Bonnie had stopped smiling.

  “I know a child that ran out into the street to keep her mama from straightening her hair. You couldn’t see a part on her scalp. It looked like her entire head was colored with black Magic Markers.”

  “That’s so sad. I would never let a thing like that happen if R.C. and I ever had a daughter.”

  “You wouldn’t have a thing to worry about. Times have changed. Mr. R.C.’s money makes him a part of a new breed of black. You know, Tomiko, they have an ethnic selection at Blockbuster Video. You can go find your roots.”

  Tomiko treasured Bonnie for acknowledging her black blood and embracing it. “I need to rent the whole section, I’m so ignorant.”

  “Child, just listen. You can learn what you need to know by just witnessing. Black people have their own ten commandments. We’re religious, but we’re proud. When we get a little money, we don’t even start with a Chevy. We say, ‘No, I got the brougham. I want the lights to blink, I want the remote that talks, and I want the loudest audio system that you can install in that sucker.’”

  Tomiko had to wipe the tears away, she was laughing so hard. Bonnie had her groove going.

  “Black folks have a Cadillac in the front yard, and the house don’t have no windows. They just left Jax’s Car Wash this morning, and they’re going back tomorrow. Half of them don’t even have a bed. They’re sleeping on a dirty pile of clothes for a mattress so they can make that next month’s car payment.

  “We’ve got a new breed of black people here in Detroit: the Chaldeans. Even though they’ve come here from Lebanon and Iran and have only been here a short while, they own most of the gas stations, the party stores, the liquor stores. We’re too stupid to see what’s happening. They got everything now. They are interested in buying up what black people are interested in.

  “The Chaldeans are trying to be like us black folks these days. Twenty-four-karat gold jewelry is the main attraction for the women. All they want is gold jewelry. They put a jewelry store on a dress. Don’t even bring them a plain dress. They need weight. They’ll get a whiplash holding up that dress, but they won’t listen if you tell them the truth; that it’s too garish.

  “And talk about their homes. Where they live, it’s usually not far from a black neighborhood. The Chaldean men try to model their women after black women. First of all, their favorite color is black. Oh yeah. They tell their women to get blackonized: ‘I want you to look like a black woman.’ They find the best-looking black woman and say, ‘Make yourself look like her.’ They want their woman stylized and jazzed up. They want them independent. Yet they expect their women to keep quiet. They mimic us. They go and get the finest. They may start at Payless, but they end up at Neiman’s.”

  “How do you know so much, Bonnie?”

  “I read, I listen, and I gossip.”

  “I don’t know how R.C. found you, Bonnie, but I’m so glad that I met you.”

  Bonnie tossed the dirty sheets out into the hallway. “I ain’t finished yet, girl. Let me tell you about the white women. These white whores that now are the rich white man’s fifth wife are the same whores that screwed them when they were married to their fourth wife. I remember one woman in particular who starred on a stupid game show we have here. She was called a home-wrecker. Her pictures were on the front page of the Enquirer. And now that same girl is in trouble, her rich mate is screwing around on her. Even though she’s on her third face-lift, and her teeny-weeny anorexic body fits into a size zero and her fake teeth shine with the whitest Pepsodent smile, she’s as miserable as a hound dog when his master leaves the house. She’s twenty years younger than his last wife and she still can’t keep his whorish ass at home.

  “She knows that she’s going to be right up there with the rest of the whores. Welcome to the dog pound. These are the dogs. The Atomic Dogs. Remember that dance?”

  “No,” Tomiko said timidly.

  “I keep forgetting you ain’t from around here.”

  “What about the second, third, and fourth wives? Where did they go?”

  “Girl, they went to the old wives’ camp.”

  Tomiko laughed until her small belly ached, and with that laughter, she began to feel brighter and more hopeful that her life with R.C. would get better.

  6

  __________

  “If I don’t do this now, I never will,” Thyme said to herself as she applied a third coat of mascara. All night she’d been thinking about her upcoming meeting with her attorney. Look at me, she thought, stepping back from the mirror and assessing herself. I look like a professional, speak like a professional, and conduct business like a professional. Why should I have to fight for the respect I deserve?

  N
ot even her husband understood how she felt. How could he? He wasn’t black and he wasn’t female. He’d supported her in the beginning when she’d first begun to agitate over not receiving promotions, but his support didn’t seem to go very deep. How could she tell him she had taken the next step toward filing the lawsuit?

  When she had interviewed for college, Thyme had been asked: “As an aspiring black American about to enter college, what do you want?” Her stock answer was “To be a black face in a high place.” That was still her answer.

  As valedictorian of her high school class in 1971, she had delivered the commencement speech at graduation. Even though blacks represented less than two percent of her graduating class in West Bloomfield, she had structured her speech as a message to her fellow pioneers. She ended with: “I believe racism is a fundamental form of human evil. And I believe we cannot hide from evil. I feel that racism can be changed, reformed, ameliorated, even restricted. But racism will always take some form in society today and we can’t ignore it.”

  She was to learn later that the five-minute-long ovation she had received was unprecedented. The irony was that as an outspoken black female during her high school years, she had kept silent about her relationship with one of the most popular white athletes, Cy Tyler. Even though her classmates accepted her as the valedictorian, she knew that they would never condone interracial dating.

  Cy’s twin sister, Sydney, had discovered their affair right before graduation. She threatened to tell the Tyler family, which would have been disastrous for both Cy and Thyme when her parents were alive. Like Cy, Sydney was a natural blue-eyed blond. She was the homecoming queen. With wide-set eyes, a narrow nose, full lips, a center cleft in her chin, and a prominent jaw, she was a female version of Cy. And as twins, they were as close as one second is to the next.

  Ironically, if Sydney hadn’t played her hand, Thyme might not have had the nerve to prepare a speech about being black and being proud of it. And she might have never discovered how much Cy truly loved her when, later that night, he had slipped an engagement ring on her finger.

  At that young age she had never questioned Cy about how he felt about her race. They weren’t concerned with the prejudices of the world; their only care was how much they loved each other. In truth, she was always so conservative, so neat, so proper, so unblack, as to appear color-less despite her deep chocolate skin.

  To Cy, she felt, color hadn’t mattered. And for a long time it hadn’t mattered to her.

  But now, more than twenty-five years later, race did matter. It factored into every aspect of her life, and it was time she did something about it.

  After spraying a touch of oil sheen on her hair, she brushed her wrapped hairstyle until every strand was in place. She gave her makeup a final check and glanced at her watch. Turning out the lights in the bathroom, she hurried into the bedroom to say good-bye to Cy. “Call me, honey.” She kissed his groggy head, and flew down the back hallway. It was twenty minutes to five in the morning. Cy didn’t have to get up for another hour.

  She grabbed her purse and keys. Halfway down the hall, she made a U-turn back to the kitchen. She’d forgotten to write out the weekly check for her cleaning lady, Sonia.

  All during the thirty-minute drive to work, she scrutinized every year of her and Cy’s marriage. She hadn’t realized until now how easily she made excuses to condone their interracial relationship. It all seemed to be coming to a head now.

  In the first five years of their marriage, she’d held firm in her conviction not to have children. Had God been trying to tell her something even then? She’d told Cy and herself that she wanted and needed to concentrate fully on her education and career, that she believed that would prove most fulfilling. It took Thyme eight years, while working full-time at Champion Motors, to acquire a master’s and Ph.D. But truthfully she was afraid to bring biracial children into this world. She felt she was able to handle the prejudicial treatment of being black, but how could she be certain that she could protect her offspring from the prejudice—from both black and white races?

  God had been kind. In the early years of their marriage, Thyme had failed to conceive, which provided a natural cover for her true feelings. Children could come later, Thyme assured her husband. But as time went by, she and Cy had fallen into a stiff silence on the subject.

  It was hump day, Wednesday, the day to get over and ride downhill toward the weekend. Thyme made it to her office at precisely two minutes to five. A truck was just pulling out of the dock, filled with seat cushions from Rouge Build, heading for the assembly plant. She thought back on the Delta bolts problem at Rouge Build last week. Thyme had planned on sending two workers to Rouge Build to install the bolts so the cars could move on to the assembly line at River Rouge. But the situation was so critical that she’d had to send four utility workers. Valentino had been one of them and it hadn’t been long before Ron told her Luella was complaining about Valentino’s getting overtime.

  Luella was worse than a computer virus. Intent on infecting the minds of her fellow workers against one another, she was a time bomb. Thyme was certain that one day Luella would explode on her.

  Thyme was relieved that the major ordeal of last week, the tour with Allied Vespa, had gone well. Initially, the group of minority businessmen refused to see how they could benefit from switching their business to Troy Trim. Skeptical of Allied’s intentions early on, Thyme had done her research and felt comfortable with any questions asked her. She still didn’t understand why management had her going through the motions, but she was certain they could match GM’s bid.

  This week had started smoothly enough, but the day before an hourly employee had threatened to kill his supervisor. As Thyme began sorting through her desk papers, Elaine knocked and then handed her a mound of faxes. “Doug Bierce from Security just called and asked if you would give him a ring when you had a moment.”

  “Did he mention what it was about?”

  “Yeah. A supervisor’s car was broken into.”

  “What’s the matter with everybody?” Thyme frowned and started sorting through the faxes.

  Turning on her computer, she checked her propfs mail. Propfs, an electronic mail used by all salaried workers at Champion, was the primary method of communication within the company. After answering her mail, she went to work on the mounds of problems that were a daily part of her job. She found a moment to call Doug in Security, who brought her up to speed on the incident, just before Elaine buzzed her.

  “Dr. Tyler,” Elaine said, over the intercom. “Your meeting with Ron is in fifteen minutes.”

  “Thanks, Elaine.” She organized the folders on her desk and headed out of the office. She dreaded going to the meeting with Ron to discuss the case of the homicide threat. Any discussion with Ron on the matter seemed bound to end in an argument. How could Ron defend the actions of an employee who had threatened the life of a supervisor? The employee had to be fired; there was no other resolution. Champion’s policy was clear and, friendship or not, she would not bend the rules.

  The meeting took two hours, and was just as rough as she’d predicted it would be. It turned out that the incident Doug had called her about was part of this same situation. The employee who had threatened the life of his supervisor was the same one who had broken into the car this morning. The incident was further complicated because of race: the employee was black, the supervisor white. When Thyme announced she would fire the employee, Ron looked at her with bitter disgust. She knew that the subject of her white husband wasn’t far from his mind.

  Glancing at the clock on the wall, she now felt relieved to have to leave for her appointment with her attorney. Her attorney’s office, on the sixteenth floor of Cadillac Towers, was located just three blocks from Cy’s new office building. Wearing a wide pair of dark sunglasses and scurrying into the remodernized structure, Thyme felt like a convicted criminal. She moved to the back of the elevator and waited until the car stopped on the tenth floor. Once she annou
nced herself to the receptionist, Thyme was escorted into her attorney’s office.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Tyler.”

  “Afternoon,” Thyme said tentatively. She was still nervous.

  Stephen Kravitz’s office was expensively furnished. From the gilt-framed paintings to the polished mahogany desk, the atmosphere smelled of success and old money.

  “I’ve been discussing your case with my partners. Chances are Champion will settle before ever going to court.”

  “Why?”

  “Union negotiations.” He put his hands behind his head. “This is contract year, Mrs. Tyler. You’ve picked an opportune time: the company can’t afford any more bad publicity.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Your situation appears to be a solid case of blatant discrimination.”

  Thyme smiled, and her body relaxed. She eased back in her chair and listened, releasing the buttons on her jacket and crossing her legs. She’d written Spielberg, Baum, and Kravitz a retainer check for ten thousand dollars. No matter what, her reputation and self-respect were worth the money. Now if only she was able to make Cy understand.

  “I’ll read you a copy of the deposition that we plan to present to Champion. There are six counts in the lawsuit.” He leaned forward and shuffled through the stack of legal documents.

  “‘Count One. That the Plaintiff, Thyme Tyler, is, and at all times relevant to the allegations contained herein was, a resident of the City of Bloomfield, County of Oakland, and State of Michigan . . .’”

  As he continued to read, Thyme felt the tears slipping down her cheeks. This was serious. She hadn’t wanted it to get to this point. She had prayed that Champion would promote her. There was no turning back now. Thyme heard him add: