The coffee shop was hidden halfway down a side street off Center Avenue. A quaint anachronism amidst a concrete jungle of modernity, the coffee shop’s neon was dead and the canvas awning was frayed and sagged under its own weight. The Fifties hadn’t died. They’d merely retired to this unimposing dive tucked away within a future that had forgotten to decide their fate.
Handsome, his stomach knotted in righteous hunger, noticed none of it as he marched through the door. He made straight for the counter, fell ass-first onto the closest empty stool and announced, “Shrimp basket and a Herschel’s.”
The waitress behind the counter, a frumpy white woman with many strenuous years behind her and too many still ahead, topped a milkshake with a cherry and walked away. As famished as he was, Handsome was willing to exercise patience. He knew waiting tables was hard, thankless work and he was determined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
After fifteen minutes in the nearly empty coffee shop, Handsome’s benefit of the doubt morphed into the undeniable fact that the wait staff – the white wait staff – was ignoring him.
He had a hard time reconciling such pronounced unapologetic racism with the fact that he was its recipient. Here he was: Harvard law grad, magna cum laude, four months with the most prestigious law firm in Madsen, New Jersey. He was the first person in his family to graduate college and he would soon be the first to own his own home. His suit was clean, pressed and obviously expensive. Anyone should be able to take the most cursory look at him and find no reason to judge him to be anything other than an upwardly mobile contributor to the community.
Save for one glaring trait.
“They know ya not gonna tip,” said a voice with a pronounced twang. Handsome looked to his right and saw its source two seats down.
He was a tall lithe black man with a checkered shirt and bolo tie underneath a fringed leather jacket. White tufts of hair at his temples and the back of his head sprung from underneath the bill of his Stetson. His head sat proudly atop his shoulders. Dignity ran through the folds of his grizzled features and bloomed from his gray handlebar mustache. “S’why they ain’t servin’ us,” he continued.
“That’s stupid,” countered Handsome. “They don’t know that. I always tip at least twenty percent, even if the waitress doesn’t deserve it.”
“But ya do see why they’d think so?”
Handsome furrowed his brow suspiciously. “Look,” he said, “no offense, but you’re not one of those old Ruckus white-man-can-do-no-wrong brothers, are you?”
The old cowboy shook his head as he moved the stool next to Handsome. “No. No, I ain’t that. But ya oughtn’t be so quick to cast a stone. Those boys just doin’ what they gotta to survive, ya know?”
Now Handsome shook his head. “Abandoning and castigating your own race isn’t a matter of survival.”
“Ya think the Romans threw every Christian to the lions? Don’ ya think some ‘em renounced and saved their skins?”
Handsome sighed and wearily rubbed his eyes with heels of his palms.
The cowboy slapped him playfully on the back. “Lord, this here’s got ya dander up but fierce, boy,” he said.
“I can’t understand how you’re able to take it in stride like you are.”
“Why’sat puzzlin’?”
“Because it’s the twenty-first century. I’m not naïve enough to think racism should be dead by now. But this?” he asked in a raised voice, waving his arm around the circumference of the coffee shop. “This is like what you must’ve dealt with when you were my age.”
“Oh, I dealt with much worse ‘an this here.”
“Like what?”
“Aaah, I ain’t gettin’ into it. Unpleasant memories and all, ya know?”
Handsome nodded sheepishly. “Sure. Sorry.”
“S’quite awright. What’s ya name, son?”
“Handsome.” He extended his hand.
The old cowboy clasped and shook it. “Tex.”
Handsome couldn’t help but expel a single chortle. “C’mon! ‘Tex?’”
“S’right.”
“You from Texas?”
“Small Knuckles, Arkansas.”
“Small Knuckles, Arkansas.”
“Then why are you called, ‘Tex?’”
“Loooooong story. And not an interestin’ one.”
Handsome paused and regarded Tex for a silent moment. He let out another sigh, more bemused than annoyed. “I’m sorry,” he started. “But you seem to have a lot to say for someone who doesn’t want to talk about himself.”
Tex held up a single finger of correction. “Now, I ain’t shy. But y’all goin’ off two stories with no wisdom to impart. Ya want me to learn ya a thing?”
“No disrespect, Tex, but I’m a graduate of Harvard Law and…”
“What I got to teach ya,” Tex interrupted, “ya can’t learn in no college.”
“Well, I don’t really have much need for street smarts. I’m employed with Chotchki & Casino and I’m…”
“Ya wanna know what happens to black folk when they die?”
Handsome stared back at Tex, gobsmacked, stunned by the temerity of the claim that such knowledge could be possessed. “What?” he spit out.
“I’m gonna tell ya a story ‘bout myself. I was near ‘round your age, truck drivin’. I was haulin’ a load of hockey pucks up to Toronto. That’s in Canada…
One afternoon I stopped at this diner a couple miles south o’ Akron. It looked real ol’ and at first I was thinkin’ it was goin’ wind up bein’ closed down. But I walked in the door and there was this waitress, genteel little dear from St. Louis, makin’ coffee, jukebox playin’, everything up and up and up.
I sat down at the counter, just as unassumin’ as I’m sittin’ here, ordered some chicken. Few minutes later, she brought out this succulent breast, pipin’ hot and crispy and all, and I sank my teeth in and, like lightnin’ outta clear blue sky, I knew like I’d known my whole life, I didn’t like chicken. Never had.
Now, I know that’s a nuthin’ thing, chicken. But after a life raised on chicken, never questionin’ it, to just know it all the sudden like? Strange. Like I didn’t know myself no more. It’s a scary feelin’ to not know yaself.
I pushed the plate aside and I don’t know how long I was just starin’ at the counter, tryin’ to puzzle out what the meanin’ was. Then I felt this tap on my shoulder. I turned around and it’s this old black man, bent over and gnarled like an ol’ tree. “Say there, boy,” he said, “seein’s ya just ogglin’ the formica, you feel up to shootin’ some pool?”
At this point I was beside myself. So I figured lemme just put my mind on sumptin’ else. And right at that point, gettin’ in a game sounded right about right.
He lead me over to this ol’ ratty pool table at the back o’ the room where there’s his friend, jus’ as ol’, jus’ as black, but walkin’ upright more. “Name’s Tex,” I said.
Ol’ gnarled tree said, “This here’s my friend Simple, and my name is Mudbone.”
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