We went in quietly; wearing white shirts, black pants and kinte sashes, but I had a queasy feeling about how we were going to fit into this whimsy. The tent had been decorated like an Anglo-American 'fifties African-safari B-movie set, starring Stuart Granger, Joan Collins, and Lana Turner posing as a half-caste African-priestess-diplomat's-mistress-tragic-heroine. Ohhhhh, it made sense now: the reason for the all black male staff, the reason why we weren't allowed to wear our tuxes, the reason for the kinte cloths. The mystery was complete. It wasn't because of our unusual skills as waiters; our charm, wit, or intelligence; our unusual good looks. We were to become not just niggers for an evening, nooo, something far more deeply, meaningfully perverse and colonial than that: we were to become houseboys, wogs, kaffirs.

Was I supposed to have done something? Said something? Stormed out in protest? It's funny, but to this day, people (mainly white people) ask me why I didn't walk out and, oddly enough, this raises more feelings of humiliation in me than the evening itself did. All I can say is that we were 70 miles away from home on the outer regions of Long Island, and I needed the money. I was broke, because if I wasn't, I would never have accepted the job. Black people in a strange way understand a predicament like this. You just get caught.