Last night—well this morning, at about 1:30 p.m.—I was sorting the frozen food order in the stockroom, for which I needed to take a pass around the store to get the tow-motor and to check and see how many Celeste pizzas-for-One would be required to fill the case. There were five couples in the store, all shopping with welfare money, using the EBT “independence” card. There was an older black couple, a younger black couple and three young, mixed-race couples. These mixed couples were black men with white women. There were three independent shoppers, a white man getting off work, paying cash, an attractive middle-aged white woman, who I somehow forgot to engage in limitlessly interesting conversation, and a top of the line BT-1000, who was also paying with her money, not White Daddy’s credit line.

Back to the mixed couples: This observation was noted by two other employees and the white female customer, who was astonished at how harshly the white girls bossed their black drones around, sending them to fetch this and that, sending them back for the right thing. They treated these guys like slave boys. I expected to hear the pretty one with the curvy ass call her man a bitch at any time. The one guy said, “Yes ma’am,” every time he was scolded.”

The white woman said to me, “Okay, I really don’t get the thug appeal—they’re not even men, not by any definition I’m familiar with. But I suppose it is convenient to procure your servants from among a population whose men have been taught to mind at the hands of big, brawny women.”

This was such a level-headed statement that I should have asked if she was a jameslafond.com reader but let the opportunity slip by.

Later, when I was in the stockroom, the BT-1000 came through to use the bathroom. I would say her head weighed 20 pounds. She was dolled up with pink hair and a short skirted dress. At six feet and 350 pounds, she wiggled passed me saying, “Scooze me, Baybay,” found out she could not squeeze through the L-cart and U-boat I had loaded and two feet apart, and nudged each in its turn with her thunderous hips, jarring them out of the way as she apologized, “Scooze me, Baybay—the aventures of privacy neva end.”

On her way out, as I finished loading the L-cart, she winked to me over her shoulder with one two-inch eye lash as the giant brass-hoop earring rolled on her shoulder. Every woman in my family would jeer at her behind her back for her style/size presentation, and none of the men I currently work or train with would find her attractive. However, this thirty-year-old giantess, dressed like a stripper in bad movie, in terms of civility, grace and independence [based on her using cash rather than the welfare “independence” card] was, among the suburban supermarket clientele at that late hour, only exceeded by the mature white woman. The younger white women had more in common, socially, with the worst examples of urban, ebonic womanhood than with the preceding generation of suburban whites.

I suppose this is one of the cultural prices we pay for living in an information based society. I was, at least, entertained.