If you have read the last chapter of On Bitches you can see that the book was poised to finish on a low note. Then a trip to a large supermarket in a mixed race suburb to procure meal ingredients for my youngest son, placed me at a faithful intersection of maternal wills.
Charles had just beaten my ass out in the sun for about an hour and I was still mildly concussed from last week’s whopping and reeling from the 100 degree heat of our stick-thwacking tryst. Presumably this and my lax shopping style rendered me into a sympathetic looking white daddy figure. As an obviously working class white man, I can tell you that no white woman of any social class or in any employment position in a grocery store, has ever done me the slightest kindness. Most will sneer or object if I hold the door, scurry away if I say excuse me, reach for their smart pone if I suggest helping them lift a heavy object. The only exceptions have been available single cashiers, who immediately upon seeing I wear no wedding ring, begin angling for a date with the next target of their soulless quest for material goods and viable dick strokes. In short, most white women I have had contact with in my life are nothing but decorated meat with enough brains to seek a high-earning meat-tickler. I consequently rate few white woman as human.
On the other hand, black woman, for the most part, are either callous imitations of these soulless white women or barbaric caricatures of some pre-human cannibal queen. Still though, although most black women are soulless beasts, I have more often met good women among their kind. [I have had little contact with Asian and Latina women, though the impressions are more positive than the black or white vagina pools.] My theory for this is that our society is designed to cultivate the worst kind of gold-digging, soul-eating white whore possible and that, so calibrated, it fails but rarely to produce this noxious creature. On the other hand, the inability of many black women to meet the national, Caucasian-based, beauty standard tends to bring out the best in few even as it guarantees the worst in most. Below is one of the many proofs of this I have encountered, as if God were reminding me that my recent experiences with the negative were not truly representative.
I was behind a 60-year-old woman with her own curled hair, wearing a tasteful summer dress and shopping with coupons.
Behind me was a 50-year-old woman, with her own hair, cut short, and wearing a tasteful blouse and shorts outfit with sandals.
The cashier was a young, model-pretty mulattress who weighed in at about 100 pounds and, like the two ladies to either side of me, spoke English and smiled naturally.
I was kind of out of it and was not used to shopping at these upscale suburban joints with the club card and the coupons and the stipulations attached to their use. Seeing the incompetently selected nature of my purchase, once on the belt, the lady ahead of me asked me a few questions and determined I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and was going to end up spending 50% more than I should. They all pitched in with coupons and cards and advice for future shopping experiences with this store, and got me through the line paying $16 and change instead of $23 and change.
The final act consisted of the little cashier babe—who looks like the actress that plays the brothel madam on Black Sails, but lacks the French accent—not placing my change in my hand until she supported my receiving hand with hers. I must admit, in a hurry to my son’s, I was having some tremors from not hydrating well enough after the training session and she apparently noticed this and didn’t want me dropping my change. There was a genuine human tenderness to this encounter which elevated me from my haze as I walked back out into the sun...past two towering, scowling, whore-dressed ghetto bitches swearing like sailors about some dude they were about to “fuck up!”
In the future, when passing such savage wenches on the day-to-day, I will try to recall those two soft little hands making sure my swollen paw received its deposit while the lady behind encouraged, “There you go, sir. May you have a blessed day—and remember your discount card, okay.”
Books by James LaFond
James,
Thanks for publishing this piece. Your observations about the racial divide among women are similar to my own in this regard. How much of the observed pattern that you speak of vis a vis the dichotomy between white women and black women do you think is geographic (aka a Baltimore thang') in nature???
I think I met the last white women still in possession of her soul in Baltimore about eight years ago. Alas, she was a Pictish transplant that had absconded south of Yo' Hadrians wall. Maybe that doesn't count.
In my early days I kept as my concubine a facsimile of the mulatress cashier you spoke of. I have many fond memories. She was one of the few among the many that I laid with who did not have a soul possessed by mercantile interests or pure vanity.
The older Black women that you speak of...do you think that in some ways they are like the older Black gentlemen at the mixed race sports bar? Preserving what is at this point (especially in that area) the dwindling arts of empathy hospitality and kindness that those females of our pale cast used to exhibit?
Living in the Northern lands as I do today...I can see the same scene that you describe being played out among the various tribes women that inhabit this area. In the Baltimore hive the only women that would likely come to your aid in such a fashion that were not black would probably be 80 year old white ladies in Dundalk. Maybe.
Glad you liked it, Nero.
For working class scrubs like us in Baltimore, the last vestiges of gentility are older black folks. The old white folks—like the Dundalk broads you spoke of—are usually tough and hard.
What I think this goes back to is slavery: The Irish were in the fields and the blacks were in the house, so they inherited the affectations of civility and if you make anything a habit it will change you along its lines...
If you've read any of comments you know I have no love for Blacks but Black Women can often be very sweet. I try to treat everyone I meet with civility no matter what color. White Women usually don't catch this but Black girls do frequently and feed it back.