It was early afternoon on my first Super Bowl Sunday in the United States. I was getting to the end of my cleaning job at the Firestone Complete Auto Care shop near K-Mart when she walked in with her parents and made for the Manager's counter. I had already finished up at a smaller shop on Airport Road and looking forward to a short nap before the big game. The sweat poured off my forehead but I was too preoccupied with a particularly stubborn stain on the white tiles to pay any mind to the new arrivals.
When I finally raised my head, they were at the counter, a young white couple with their pretty daughter. She appeared to be about six, and looked wholesome in her shiny barbie-blondness, her pigtails caught up in dainty, pink ribbons. A delicate pair of glasses added a professorial air as she scrutinized everything in sight.
She watched me go at the tough stain for a moment, batted her blue eyes at me and smiled. Then she opened her mouth.
"Do you love this job?"
Everything seemed to slow down as all eyes turned on me. Time and space seemed to magnify and I imagined that the big clock on the towers of Bridge Street paused too. As did the birds in flight, and the cars speeding on Memorial Parkway.
"Do you love this job?"
The question reverberated in my brain. How dare this tiny tot ask me such a question!
It threw me off my feet, bowled me over, whirled me around and flung me across 6,000 miles of ocean into my country, Ghana, and into my prior existence as a TV producer before making the decision to pursue a graduate degree in the United States of America.
Did I love this cleaning job?
I was a Senior Production Manager at a blue-chip ad agency in Ghana where I had won two national advertizing awards in radio and TV, with my award-winning radio ad for Dasani archived at the headquarters of the Coca-Cola Company in the US. In producing a multitude of ad spots for some of the biggest corporations in the West African region, I had had the arduous previlege of working with top foreign film crews and auditioning countless glamorous models-sometimes, as many as three hundred in a single day-who would have killed for a role.
On arriving in the US, however, I realized that all my qualifications and experience amounted to zero. Zilch. Not that they had anything against degrees and qualifications from other countries; it was simply policy. If one wanted to work at a professional level in this country, one had to be certified here. Except, of course, in some rare cases.
Love this job?
I was acutely aware that her parents had tensed up. I could have answered in the affirmative, which would have been perfectly acceptable since it would affirm the dignity of labor. But I sensed her parents were scared such a response would lead her to think it was all right to be a cleaner, thereby wiping out-in a single word- about 4,000 manhours of inculcating the values of aspiration and personal achievement in their impressionable daughter, and causing irreparable damage.
But having been in this country for a little over four months-and having more than a passing interest in American history-I was also aware of the peculiar tensions governing the relations between blacks and whites. I was particularly unnerved by the idea that everything I did as a blackman had to be filtered through a white lens, that I had to weigh every prospective action in the light of how a whiteman would view it. But, truth is, I had never been conscious of my blackness till I arrived in this country. This had placed an unwelcome burden on me as a blackman to go the extra mile in any activity lest I fail to "uplift" my race. In short, I had to think carefully about my answer.
There's a passage in W.E.B. Du Bois' seminal piece, "The Souls of Black Folk," in which he observes that whenever he met a white person, an unasked question always seemed to hang in the air, a question-maybe of race, education and ability-either too delicate for some whites to ask or lacking the right words to frame it.
It occured to me that this little white girl could ask this question because she was unencumbered by the acculturative influences of her society which might have caused an older person to consider such a query as too delicate or politically incorrect.
So I looked her straight in the eye, smiled and spoke as sweetly as I could.
"Nope.This is just to pay the bills."
She blinked twice in quick succession. But the collective sigh of relief from her parents and the mostly white customers could be heard from Alabama all the way to Alaska. They broke out in wide grins and patted each other on their backs.
"Smart answer!" I thought I overheard one say.
I looked at my young interlocutor.
"Honey, you don't want to do this job when you're my age; stay in school and study hard, OK?"
She nodded gravely, her eyes firmly trained on me.
I went back to my task, satisfied with how I had handled the situation. If my eight-year-old son had asked someone this question, I would have expected the person to give him the same response; nothing more, nothing less.
You can, therefore, imagine my great surprise when the girl's parents returned half an hour later with a large box of Krispy Creme doughnuts and asked the manager where I was. I tried to sneak away but he beckoned me over. They handed the box to me with a cute, little speech they must have spent the last thirty minutes rehearsing.
I accepted it with equanimity , made the appropriate noises and tossed the box inside my car.
Before arriving in this country, I had never encountered this experience of looking at myself "through the eyes of others," of gauging my behavior through "Western Eyes," and forcing myself to, as it were, behave in a way that would "uplift my race." In my previous experience, "humor" was humor and being friendly meant exactly what it was, not an attempt to ingratiate oneself with a particular world. Respect was demanded, and received without clamor or condescension: it was a simple affirmation of universal brotherhood.
Once, during my first weeks here, I was cleaning the windows of a showroom when I encountered two white men smoking outside. One of them turned to me and delicately asked:
"Did you come here on the US Visa lottery?"
"No," I responded. "I'm a graduate student at a university here."
At this, they fell silent and ignored me. I never understood why they did that.
Till today.
So, I drove home that afternoon, sifting through the incident and the state of our union, acutely aware that no real progress would be made in the relationship between these two worlds till we dropped this nebulous, invisible veil and simply related to each other as men.
Nothing else mattered.
© Johnson Arloo
April 10, 2012.
Huntsville, Alabama.
