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We all shuffled off the ship? bus? cattle truck? wagon? and awaited
our instructions. Our hostess
 was there to look us over. She inspected our teethees, hairzez, bicepsizs and gentletalias. She then turned us over to her Beauregard of a son so that he could take us to our shanty so we could change and go to work. While we wuz getting changed, this charming little Rhett Butler came back with instructions that he passed on to the captain-in-charge, who was actually another brother and was all of a sudden finding himself with a potential history-making caterwaiter uprising of catastrophic proportions on his hands. The captain looked like Oscar De La Renta with a 10-year-old unsuccessful enema sitting inside him, still waiting for the explosion. So he naturally assumed the position of plantation boss. He called us his
 and told us to gather round--we were about to be let in on the secret. I kept thinking, Please, I want to be kept in suspense for as long as possible. Our gracious hostess,
 was very nice to us when she greeted us, of course, because we were there to do her bidding, because she needed our labor, our obvious black male-signifying labor, because black labor is totally different from white labor. The word from Mizz Scarlet was that we were not to wear tuxedos because it was a "theme party"--and we were the "theme." We were to wear white baker's pants and walk around bare-chested sporting some of her Wonderful African Jewelry. Our first problem was with the bare-chested part. It was a cool evening, with some wind. My friend said, "We will freeze." The captain, acting as our negotiator, was finding himself in a very awkward position. He must have felt like a Negro slaver selling off his brothers. He left and came back and said that a compromise had been reached with the big Missis: we would be allowed to wear our white shirts in addition to her outfits. Some compromise. Each of us was then handed a kinte cloth sash to wear beauty-pageant style. I thought, Oh my God, the finale will be a slave auction. |
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