“We’ll be watching, Clyde. You can count on us. Back to you, Chet.”
Reader: Hell hath no fury like a white man scorned. Especially in the world of business. If you’re going to do something to piss them off, be prepared for them to strike back sooner or later.
Rhett turned to me. “What did I tell you?”
What did he tell me? He told me a lot of things, almost too many to keep track of. I shrugged.
“I told you,” he said, balancing the pool stick on his neck like a peasant carrying water buckets, “that Clyde was well-connected and angry, that he could either do something very good or very bad. And now he’s like the sales version of Hitler. Who knows what he’s capable of.”
“You’re right. But what does this have to do with me?”
He paused, placed the pool stick down, and stared at me. “That’s a good question, Buck. What does this have to do with you?”
My heart beat harder than a racist cop in Kentucky. I was doing all I could not to choke, sweat, or fidget. “Stop with the games, Rhett,” I said, steadying my voice. “What is it you want to know?”
He rounded the coffee table in front of the couch and bent forward at the waist until we were eye to eye. “I want to know whether you’re involved with these Happy Campers. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me you’re not behind this. Because if you are, you’re compromising everything we’ve done here by bringing race into the mix. If you hadn’t noticed, race isn’t all that popular a topic these days, especially for startups.”
Funny. Race was popular when he brought me on Rise and Shine, America for “optics.” I gripped the black leather couch, held his stare, and said, “I am not in any way involved with the Happy Campers. I have enough on my plate with you and Barry, man. You think I have the time to go play Huey Newton? Come on, Rhett.”
He stared a moment longer, searching. Then he smiled and walked toward the windows. “Good, that’s all I needed to hear. Especially because I’m going to need you now more than ever.”
“What’s going on?”
“The business is doing well, we’re growing and closing a record number of deals, but it feels stale around here,” he said, staring out a window overlooking the East River. “We’re not innovating anymore, Buck. The board’s contented with the positive growth, but that’s not what’s going to take us to the next level.”
“So what is?”
He turned around, grinning. “A conference. Every major player has one. HubSpot, Salesforce, you name it.”
“Great,” I said, happy he’d have something other than me and the Happy Campers to focus on. “When is it?”
“End of this month. Friday, September twenty-seventh. We’re going to bring in A-list speakers, have a concert, and cement ourselves as the premier thought leader in SaaS therapy.”
“That all sounds expensive, man. And a few weeks isn’t a long time to make this happen.”
He laughed. “You’re right, which is why marketing has been on it for the past three months behind the scenes. And all I need from you is to show up, give a presentation on why diversity matters, and make everyone fall in love with you.”
I shifted on the couch, failing to get comfortable. “I don’t get it. You just said race isn’t popular. Why would I present on diversity?”
He walked back toward me and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Race isn’t popular, Buck. It’s a dirty word. But diversity isn’t. Everyone’s talking about it. And the more people talk about it, the more attention it’ll bring to whoever’s leading the charge. And since you’ve hired more than a handful of”—he paused—“people of color, who better to present on this than you, right?”
I began to pity Rhett then. He was so smart and saw so much, yet he was still a prisoner to his limited worldview. But it wasn’t my problem.
“Right,” I replied. “I get it. Great idea. Can’t wait.”
“Now that’s the Buck I know.”
* * *
A week later, the Talented Fifth, which was what everyone called HC’s leadership—Rose, Brian, Ellen, Jake, and I—met to discuss how we were going to fight WUSS. The ideas ranged from too moderate, like writing blog posts and sending them to major news outlets, to too extreme, like doing a drive-by on their headquarters. So we all decided that something in the middle would be an appropriate first line of attack.
When we shared the plan with all of the Happy Campers on Wednesday, they were as divided as white teens after reading Twilight. But instead of #TeamJacob and #TeamEdward, we had #TeamTooSoft and #TeamJustRight. Jason, the main voice for #TeamTooSoft, stood after we explained our plans, and said, “Y’all niggas are straight pussy, I swear, bro.”
“No need for that, bruh,” Jake said, stepping toward him.
“Nah, y’all actin’ like a bunch of Uncle Toms and mammies. We need to go Nat Turner on these crackers and blow they whole shit up. If not, it’s jus’ gonna get worse. Watch.”
“I d-d-disagree,” Trey, a member of #TeamJustRight, said, stepping between Jake and Jason. “This is a good f-first attack to see what we’re dealing with. And to see how the public r-r-reacts.”
Jason looked down at Trey and laughed. “Aye, Buck, get your li’l mans out my face before I stuff him in a garbage can.”
Trey, despite Jason standing a full foot above him, didn’t back down. Even though he usually walked around like a kid who’d lost his mommy in the supermarket, when it came to defending me and my ideas, he always had my back. I couldn’t have had a better partner.
“Alright, everyone chill. The good thing is that it doesn’t matter what any of you think,” I said. “It’s decided. And we’re doing it tomorrow night. If you want to be here for it, then be here. If not, be gone.”
I stared at Jason and his followers looking salty as hell in the corner. Despite still being hotheaded, Jason was doing well for himself. Unlike most of the Happy Campers, he landed a job with one of the few Black-owned startups in New York City—some Ancestry.com-like company specializing in Black DNA.
The next night, a group of us gathered in the living room. One of our veteran Happy Campers, Kujoe, typed away on his laptop, his typing displayed on every screen. The plan was to hack WUSS’s website and social media, replace their logo with swastikas, post a bunch of racist articles from far-right, neo-Nazi news outlets, and, we hoped, find some incriminating bigoted emails from Clyde and the rest of WUSS’s leadership.
Kujoe had graduated with a PhD in computer science back in Ghana and had been hacking corrupt politicians from the age of twelve. He was also a skilled SDR and worked with me at Sumwun.
“Okay,” he said, flexing his fingers. “Let us begin.”
People passed around buckets of popcorn, bags of Twizzlers, and boxes of Milk Duds.
Kujoe happily narrated as he typed. “So, last night I used a Trojan on him.”
“Damn, nigga,” Jason said. “I knew you was gay, but you into white dudes? Say it ain’ so.”
Kujoe kept his eyes on his laptop. “Not a Trojan condom, American idiot. A Trojan horse attack. I sent Clyde an email acting like I was someone interested in joining WUSS. The email contained a download link, and the obroni was dumb enough to download it, giving me access to his computer.”
His fingers flew over the keyboard as if they were dancing.
“So he has no idea?” someone asked.
Kujoe smiled. “None. We are going to take these bastards down. So now I am scanning for open ports on his computer, which”—he shimmied in his seat from left to right—“I just found. Gotcha, kwasia. Okay, we are in!”
Everyone clapped their hands, high-fived, and watched the screens open up to Clyde’s computer. His desktop photo was a portrait of Ronald Reagan.
“So,” Kujoe said, winking at Jason. “Where should we start?”
Trey stood, pointing at the screen. “Wh-wh-what’s that folder? Up-p-p-pity Campers take-d-d-down?”
“Oh, fuck these motherfuckers!” Rose shouted. “Kujoe,
open that shit up and let’s blast them to pieces.”
“Your wish is my command, Queen.” Kujoe spun around, cracked his neck, and clicked open the folder.
Two seconds later, a grotesque photo filled the screen, accompanied by cartoon-villain-like HA! HA! HA! HAs.
“What the fuck?” Jason said. He grabbed one of the screens and almost yanked it off the wall.
There was a black-and-white photo of six Black men hanging from trees with broken necks as a crowd of white men, women, and children looked on with glee as if they were at the circus. The laughter looped on and on, then the screens began to go black.
“No!” Kujoe shouted. Seconds later, his laptop’s entire screen was dark. He kept punching his keyboard but nothing happened.
“What is it?” I asked, peering over his shoulder.
“A honeypot,” he whispered, shaking his head. “That folder was a trap. They just fried my laptop.”
“What do you mean?” I pressed. “For them to have set a trap, they had to have—”
“Known we were coming,” he said.
Rose walked over, hands on her hips, fire in her eyes. “So he downloaded that thing, the Trojan, on purpose? And we just walked into an ambush?”
Kujoe nodded and closed his laptop.
“But how could he have known?” Brian asked. Lines of confusion mixed with sweat on his forehead.
“Doesn’ matter,” Jason said, standing in the center of the living room with his arms stretched out. “This is what the fuck I was talkin’ ’bout. Niggas ain’ playin’ out here with this cyberwarfare shit. We need to get physical. I’m sayin’ we gotta get our Malcolm X on and stop these honkies by any means necessary.”
“No,” I said. “That’s what they want us to do. Once we get physical, we expose ourselves. Once we’re exposed, they can attack every single thing we’ve achieved. And I’m not about to let that happen.”
“So then what are we going to do?” Rose asked.
I took a second, trying to think of how to hurt Clyde where it would sting most, but drew a blank. “Listen,” I said, turning to Jason. “I know you wanna get violent, but as corny as it sounds, violence isn’ the answer. I’m sure between the two of you”—I looked at him and Rose—“you can uncover some shit about Clyde. So get creative and we’ll base our next move on that.”
“Aight.” Jason nodded at Rose. “We’ll get on it.”
30
“Okay,” I said, wrapping up the Monday sales meeting. “Anything else before we break?”
Hundreds of eyes stared back at me, too many to count. Among them were Brian, Kujoe, and almost fifteen other Happy Campers I’d hired in the last six months. And despite what segregationists would have you think, things were as smooth as a baby’s ass. At least I thought they were.
“Yeah,” Tiffany, the blonde, sadistic former senior SDR—now an enterprise AE—said from the back of Qur’an. She was wearing a white button-up blouse with maroon high-waisted pants.
“You have the floor, madam,” I said from the head of the table. Rhett was no longer in these Monday meetings, so I was the Lord and HNIC of the sales team.
“I know we have a bunch of snowflakes who are going to be offended,” she said, standing up. “But I have to call out the fact that a lot of the newer SDRs are handing over shit that never closes.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes, really. And since none of the other AEs want to come out and say it, I will. It’s all of the new minority SDRs who are handing over shit.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. “Hold up, Tiff—”
“Funny,” Kujoe said, also standing up. “All of us minority SDRs have felt like the obroni AEs have been scrutinizing our handoffs harder than those of the other obroni SDRs.”
“Obroni?” Tim, a newer white AE said, getting in Kujoe’s face. “This is America, not Mali or whatever shithole country you’re from. We speak English here.”
“I’m from Ghana!” Kujoe shouted, shoving Tim back.
More white AEs stood, getting in minority SDRs’ faces, and other white SDRs crowded the AEs, picking their allegiances based on skin color. Brian looked over at me, nervous, and I had no idea what was happening or where this was coming from. I just knew I had to stop it before a race riot broke out.
“Hold the fuck up!” I shouted. Everyone froze. “And sit the fuck down,” I ordered, scanning the room. “Now!”
Everyone sat, but now the room was literally divided by minorities on one side, leaning against the glass that looked out onto the hallways, and white salespeople on the other, leaning against the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Park Avenue.
“What is going on?” I asked, looking at Tiffany.
“What’s going on is that we’re finally standing up for our rights, just like Clyde would have done if he were still here. Ever since you got in that seat, we’ve seen how you favor the Black SDRs and how much time you spend with them. White lives matter, too.”
“Okay,” I said, standing with my hands out, surrendering. “I’m sorry if some of you feel like I’ve played favorites or that”—I looked at the minority SDRs—“certain people are out to get you. But we are one team, and the company is doing better than ever, so we can’t become divided now. Please, just go get some food and let’s start the week off right.”
I sat with my head in my hands as everyone poured out of the heavy wooden doors. Then I felt a thick, burly hand on my shoulder.
“Yeah?” I said, trying to smile as I looked into Frodo’s concerned face. He was still an SDR, having plateaued months ago. However, he had upgraded his wardrobe from football T-shirts to pastel-colored polos with the collars popped. Some people are hopeless.
He grabbed a chair and sat next to me. “Buck, is everything going to be okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, rubbing his back. “You just focus on getting promoted, man. Don’t let this shit bring you down.”
He nodded. “I will, but I’m hearing things, Buck.”
“Hearing things? Like voices, Frodo?”
“Yeah, but not like, uh, in my head. Just, um”—he looked toward the window—“more talk about race and stuff. Ever since that video with Clyde and his group. I think he has followers here.”
Clyde. The gift that keeps on giving, like hemorrhoids.
“Okay, Frodo,” I said, helping him up. “What I need from you is to be my eyes and ears. If you hear something, say something. I don’t want to be caught with my pants down, you know?”
“What do you mean, Buck? Do you, uh, need a belt?”
I looked at him for a while, knowing he meant well but that he was still as dumb as rocks. “Yeah,” I said, laughing. “You’ll be my belt, man.”
* * *
So much for a belt. On Tuesday morning, all hell broke loose. I was at Sumwun reviewing the AEs’ Q3 pipelines when Rose texted me.
Washington Square Park. The arch. NOW!
“Sorry,” I said, rising from the table in Qur’an. “I have an emergency. Eddie, keep it going.”
By the time I got to Washington Square Park, there was a crowd in front of the arch. I planted myself on a bench near the fountain close enough where I could see what was going on but far enough where I’d be hard to recognize, especially with the oversize hoodie and sunglasses I’d bought.
From where I sat, I saw balloons, smiling teenagers, and tourists munching on cupcakes, cookies, and pie. Rose stood off to the side, enraged. A PSST News truck was parked beyond the arch, which could only mean one thing.
Here, I texted Rose. Black hoodie. To the left of the fountain facing the arch.
She looked up and walked over.
“Sit,” I said, trying not to draw attention.
She gripped her hips, shaking her head. “No, fuck no. Do you know what’s going on over there?”
“Please, Rose. We have to lay low. Sit.”
She looked back at the crowd, then slammed her ass down. “Go to PSST News. There’s a live stream of this sh
it. That Missy Anne–looking bitch Bonnie Sauren is in the middle interviewing Clyde.”
I pulled the stream up on my phone. There was a shot of a plastic folding table featuring different baked goods. Behind it were WUSS members, smiling, taking cash, and handing out cookies and donuts. Some of them, I noticed, were Sumwunners who were conveniently out sick, but who obviously didn’t care enough to hide their allegiance to Clyde by standing off camera.
“Fuck,” I said. “I see some people from Sumwun, but this just looks like a normal bake sale.”
Rose scrunched her face in disgust, like she had stepped in a pile of shit. “Keep watching.”
“So, Clyde,” Bonnie said, wearing a slim-fitting white blazer and white skirt to match her I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-bleached! blonde hair. “For all of the viewers who just joined us, please explain what’s going on here.”
“Of course,” he said, smiling directly into the camera. “We’re throwing a bake sale. But not just any bake sale. No, ours has a more modern component to it. To truly reflect the times. You see, the costs of our baked goods depend on who’s buying them. If you pan over to here, you’ll see our list of prices.”
The camera focused on a sheet of paper propped up on the table.
Donuts: 50¢ each for Blacks, 75¢ each for Hispanics, $1.50 each for Asians, $2.50 each for Whites
Cookies: 10¢ each for Blacks, 25¢ each for Hispanics, 75¢ each for Asians, $1 each for Whites
Pie: $1 slice for Blacks, $1.50 slice for Hispanics, $2 slice for Asians, $3.50 slice for Whites
Coffee: Free for Blacks, and only for Blacks
“No fucking way,” I said, gripping the phone so hard it hurt.
“We figured that with affirmative action being such a hot topic—since it’s basically a tool for reverse racists to fill top institutions with kids who don’t belong there—we’d boil the issue down to something more tangible so people can understand the real harm that reverse discrimination inflicts on those who have nothing to do with the actions of their ancestors.”
Black Buck Page 30