400 Days of Oppression

by Wrath James White

  Kenyatta was still smiling when he answered.

  “Yes. With a fucking tattoo on your face. It isn’t permanent. It’ll fade away in two or three weeks. I promise.”

  I felt like I was going to throw up. Everything we’d done so far had been private, between him and I and other people in the BDSM scene. People who would understand. Going out in public like this was something I hadn’t counted on. I tried to imagine walking into a job interview with my face covered in tattoos. There was no way. How would I support myself?

  As if in response to my unspoken question, Kenyatta read from the book. I wanted to snatch it out of his hands and rip it to shreds.

  “The 13th Amendment meant freedom for four million African-American slaves. However, faced with overwhelming discrimination, the majority of them soon found themselves poor and unemployed. For African Americans, finding employment in Northern cities was a difficult and sometimes impossible task. Discriminatory labor practices, demanded by European immigrants, often denied African Americans skilled jobs. Southern migrants were particularly disadvantaged since they were more likely than Northern-born blacks to have job skills. Many freed slaves were compelled to abandon their trades due to unrelenting racial prejudice and take menial, low-paying, unskilled jobs. Philadelphia employment records reveal that during this period, less than two-thirds of [black workers] who had trades followed them.

  “In New York City, officials reneged on their promise to ‘issue licenses to all regardless of race’ and buckled under pressure from white workers to exclude African Americans from jobs requiring special permits. One foreign visitor reported seeing almost no black skilled workers in the North. The few exceptions were ‘one or two employed as printers, one blacksmith and one shoemaker.’ African Americans found it almost impossible to obtain licenses, denying them important opportunities to become small businessmen and elevate their economic status. Many former slaves were forced to go back to the plantations from which they were freed and work for their former owners in agricultural jobs for very little compensation.

  “In an attempt to earn enough to avoid starvation, entire families would contract with a landowner to cultivate the land for subsistence wages or a share of the crop. Often their white employers continued to treat them as slaves and attempted to control their comings and goings, limit or prohibit visitors, and dictate their behavior. The struggle between former slaves trying, often unsuccessfully, to differentiate their employment from their previous servitude and former slaveholders, used to having total control over their workers, led to postwar workplaces that were tense, and often violent. Many former slaves did not receive the wages promised in their labor contracts, while others never found employment at all and were reduced to begging on the streets, crime, and prostitution.”

  He closed the book and glared at me.

  “Do you think you’ll have it any harder than those freed slaves?”

  “No.”

  “So, what’s it going to be? Are you out or in?”

  Again, I looked at Shakeela, at Angela, and then back at Kenyatta who was tapping his foot impatiently. I let out a long sigh and wiped the tears from my eyes.

  “I’m in.”

  Kenyatta took my hand and led me to a seat opposite Shakeela.

  “Relax,” she cooed as she cupped my face in two incredibly smooth soft hands. She turned my face left then right. Then picked up a little squirt bottle filled with a dark paste. It took her two hours to draw the design on my face and another six hours for it to set up, during which she would occasionally sprinkle lemon and water or eucalyptus oil on the paste to keep it moist.

  I wasn’t allowed to look at my face in the mirror until the tattoo had properly cured. I imagined that Kenyatta was afraid I would quit and wash it all off before it could set up. When it was finally ready, I could tell from the expression on Angela’s face, eyes wide, brow furrowed, lips pulled back away from her teeth in a grim rictus, that Kenyatta had done something awful to me. He led me to the bathroom and watched as I got my first glimpse of the abomination she’d drawn on my face. It was all I could do to keep from screaming.

  “No. No! What the hell did you do to me?”

  On my forehead, cheeks, chin, nose, beneath my eyes, even my eyelids, were flowers, paisleys, leaves and various lines and squiggles forming geometrical patterns in a dark rusty red. But what made me want to scream was what I saw in those patterns, in the lines and squiggles...words. They weren’t immediately apparent, hidden in the highly stylized calligraphy, amidst the floral patterns and designs, hateful, despicable words. “Lazy.” “Stupid.” “Violent.” “Thief.” “Slut.” “Liar.” “Criminal.” “Drug Dealer.” “Gang Banger.” “Addict.” The closer I looked, the clearer and more prominent the words became. I had been labeled with every negative stereotype with which society had labeled black Americans. It stained my skin like the mark of Cain and it would remain there for weeks.

  “The first thing black children all over America, for almost four centuries, learned was to hate their own skin, their own faces. That is part of the experience. Your disgust when you look in the mirror, seeing that you don’t look anything like the beautiful people on TV, that’s part of it. The other part will be the suspicion, hatred, disgust, and distrust others will show you because of your skin. That’s how you’ll really know what it’s like.”

  Kenyatta paid the Indian woman and showed her to the door. Then he showed me to the door as well.

  “I’ll give you twenty-four hours to find a job and an apartment. Then you’ve got to go.”

  He shoved me gently onto the porch, kissed my forehead, rubbed, squeezed, then smacked my ample buttocks, and slammed the door behind me. I stood there on the porch, weeping for moments that felt like hours, before taking a deep breath and once again wiping the tears from my eyes. I had to at least try.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Catching a taxi was my first difficulty. I walked to the nearest convenience store, eyes from passing pedestrians followed me. Children giggled and pointed. An old white lady in a red motorized scooter sneered at me in disgust and shook her head. I felt thoroughly wretched. This was worse than the box in the basement.

  The teenaged convenience store clerk looked up from his computer gamer magazine long enough to glare at me, smirk, tsk, and shake his head, before immediately reaching for his smartphone, presumably to text his buddies about the tattooed freak who’d just walked into his store. Ironic and a bit hypocritical of him considering the sleeve of dragons, zombies, and sexy devil chicks that ran up his left arm. But, of course, there were fathoms between the sort of antisocial behavior that led one to tattoo a devil in a black bikini riding a Chinese dragon on their arm and the type of insanity that led a woman to allow a man to tattoo insults all over her face.

  “Hi...uh...do you know the best place around here to catch a cab?”

  “Cool tattoo.”

  I blushed and looked away, not certain if he was fucking with me or not.

  “Uh...thanks...um...”

  “Taxi, right? They drive by occasionally, but you’d have better luck calling one. I’ll call one for you.”

  He took out his smartphone, removed a yellow business card from somewhere behind the counter, and quickly dialed the number. I looked around the store at the rows of unhealthy snacks: chips, candies, packaged cupcakes and cookies, so-called energy and “nutrition” bars, all packed with enough preservatives to ensure they’d endure a generation. Juxtaposed with stationary, paper goods, toiletries, a few odd supermarket items like bread, cake mix, pet food, soup, beans, ravioli and other canned goods. Another aisle contained automotive supplies, aspirin, allergy and sinus medications and various other pharmaceuticals. It had never occurred to me before how weird convenience stores were.

  “They said they’ll be here in twenty minutes,” the kid behind the counter said.

  “Thanks.”

  Twenty minutes. That meant I’d be stuck here with nothing to do but wander the ai
sles and wait for the next person to come in and gawk at me. It didn’t take long for the first customers to arrive. A group of Filipino teenagers with their pants sagging down below their waists so their multicolored boxers were visible, wearing 49ers jerseys, walked in. They wore practiced sneers of contempt that became genuine only when they looked at me. One of them laughed. I was mortified.

  “Check out the tattooed chick,” one of them whispered.

  “That’s crazy, yo!”

  I left the store snatching a free weekly newspaper off a stand by the front door on my way out. This time I shielded my face as I walked. My embarrassment was etched into my skin deeper than the tattoo ink. I walked to the corner and sat down on a bench, trying to read the classified ads through a veil of tears.

  There were ads for teachers, tutors, nannies, all jobs I would have been qualified for, but imagining myself walking into an interview with “Slut,” “Thief,” “Addict,” and “Drug Dealer” tattooed on my face made me skip those jobs. As I circled a cocktail waitress job and prepared to call, I wondered if black people did the same thing, skipping jobs they were qualified for out of fear of rejection. Then I reconsidered. I picked the highest paying job listed, an English teacher at a private girls’ school, and used my smartphone to email them my resume. I sent it to seven other places, including a couple in Berkeley advertising for a live-in nanny. That would’ve solved both of my most immediate problems: money and shelter. I decided to give them a call. I took a deep breath, wiped the last remnants of tears from my eyes, and dialed the number.

  “Hello?” said a woman with a raspy voice as if she’d been smoking a pack-a-day since birth and chasing it with moonshine.

  “Hi, My name is Natasha Talusa. I’m calling about your ad for a live-in nanny. Is the position still available?”

  “Yes. Yes. We are conducting interviews today. What time can you come by?”

  “I’ll be coming on BART so it will take me at least an hour.”

  “Okay. That’s fine. I don’t have any other appointments today. Hopefully you’ll be the fit we’re looking for. Do you have any experience?”

  “I taught seventh grade English for five years, and I have a degree in childhood education.”

  “Sounds good. I can’t wait to meet you.”

  I allowed myself to be hopeful as I rode the BART across the bay into Oakland and all the way to Berkeley. I ignored the stares and snickers and instead concentrated on what I would say to my prospective employer. I’d have to be damned charming to make up for my appearance.

  The BART train was crowded, as usual. This allowed me to hide among the crush of humanity. The scowls of disgust were limited to those in my immediate vicinity, but the more the crowd thinned as we headed into Berkeley, the more those scowls multiplied, shaking my nerves and causing me to question my resolve. Perhaps I should have stuck to cocktail waitress jobs or maybe even a truck stop waitress.

  “Who would write ‘slut’ or their forehead? That’s what it says isn’t it?” said a college student of mixed heritage. One of those unusual combinations of race that only Berkeley produced; black, Samoan, Filipino, and Irish or something similar. He had cinnamon colored skin, slanted hazel eyes, a wide nose, thick lips, and a thick wooly Afro. His friends, three of whom shared his exotic features, but were probably not related, all snickered. One pointed at me. I moved into the next car with them laughing at my back as I exited. I wiped tears from my eyes. This was probably the most liberal city in America. If I was getting ridiculed here, there was little hope for me.

  The next car was practically empty, and I sat alone at the back, waiting for the ride to end. I called two more job listings in the Berkeley area while I was on the train. One was for a daycare provider at the University and the other was for a tutor. Finally, the train pulled to a stop at Berkeley station. I stood and walked out of the car as others rushed on. A woman with close-cropped hair, a black leather motorcycle jacket and “SAN FRANCISCO” tattooed on her neck in large gothic lettering smiled at me and said: “Cool tattoo!” Then an expression of perplexity crossed her face as she continued staring at the designs painted onto my skin, no doubt seeing the words for the first time. I thanked her and hurried past.

  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.”

  CHAPTER 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 almos
t 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.