Miss Ezz was returning from her coffee break, during which she rates the masculine impression of the various firemen stopping into the store on the pumper truck to grab lunch—a ritual more than a few longtime cashiers engage in. As she walked across the front end of the store whose only paleface customers are firemen and the junkies they resurrect from their opium death and is almost entirely staffed by the ebony master race, she noted that the lines—for there are always lines in retail food as the economy continues to nose dive from the bottom up—she noted that a man in a white T-shirt and black cargo shorts, with sockless sneakers of purest white, was yelling at the courtesy clerk, “Y’all a bunch a slow-ass niցցers! If dis was a white stoe you would have mo help on da desk—my ass is gettin’ impatient!”

Then, as if by magic, Miss Ezz appeared in our hero’s cretinous field of indicting vision and his eyes rolled big and wide, his head lurching back, jaw drawing slack in an ecstasy of moral vindication as he pointed at her before she could dart into the manager’s office and he exalted, “Aw, I won’ dat white lady right dare waitin’ on me—you hidin’ her away from us, huh? You savin’ you white lady fo to ring up da poleese, or she jus’ crackin’ da whip on yo slow ass, huh, sista?”

As Miss Ezz found the safety of the back bunker, stripped off her name badge and checked to make certain her oversized clothes were still hanging lose enough to conceal any curves, she heard the cry of ebony privilege echoing even unto her insulated refuge, “I want a white person! I wantz me a white woman ta wait on me!”

Miss Ezz, for the first time in 30 years of service to this company, seriously pictured in her mind’s eye quitting and looked up at the store manager standing above her and snarled, “I am not going out there to bow to that man. I’m not leaving this place until he is gone—and you need to go out there and straighten this out. I’m not working like this.”

The baritone voice of the ebony church-going man answered, as if echoing a resolve to put down a long gone plantation uprising , “Yes, Miss Ezz. I’ll set him straight.”

And the call for sanity went out to the Ghetto Grocer, distant shaman of Baltimore retail food, “Jay, I work in a zoo! I don’t know how much more of this shit I can take…”