Keisha vs Scott
By Ruquayya Sajjida
A woman stands tall in an office. Her lips are spread wide in a snarl of insubordination, her eyes narrowed into small slits, a dash of sweat upon her blackened brow. She raises one hand, each finger folded in except the one in the middle. She’s raising her revolution, raising a fist to say — no, not that she’s giving in — but that she will never submit, giving all new meaning to pièce de resistance. And Scott’s pale white face folds in fear.
At this moment, she is at her most dangerous.
At this moment, she is a storm, a hurricane, a force of nature.
And damn anybody who stands in her way.
Scott lowers his arm, a tendril of her curly, wispy black hair still in his hand.
“Don’t,” she snarls, “touch my hair.” And after observing another black coworker’s outward signs of humiliation, adds, “Fuck you, Scott!”
She is removed from the office. She is sent home, unpaid, for a week. While there, she stirs, brewing up all new plans. At first, she thinks up apologies, a way to tell her boss that she truly ‘did not mean to frighten him.’ But then she wakes from a night of restless sleep and mutters two words, “The fuck?!” That very next morning, she marches down to the office to give him a piece of her damn mind.
Why should she apologize?
Why should she submit?
She remembers each second as if it were happening to her that very moment:
Scott faced her that day, a smirk on his face, one brow raised, a faint dusting of pink to his pale cheeks. And she fumbles. How is she to emerge victorious in the face of this white man’s oppression? He touched her hair, and when his ring got caught in it, he yanked, pulling a few sky-black tendrils free. She snapped and he remarked that her hair wasn’t even truly appropriate for the office setting in the first place, said it was she who should apologize to him.
And as she remembered those minutes of humiliation, which stretched on for hours, days, years, an endless eternity, she felt that rage bubbling up again, a fire-breathing dragon in her belly, gripping her words in her chest and pushing them up and out her mouth like a crashing wave of embers. One of her white coworkers, jollily sneered, “Watch out, she’s rearin’ up!” While another coworker, this one also black, shook their head, raising their hands to calm her, already beaten by the system that called women like Keisha too outspoken, too brazen, too extra. Seeing the dulled submission in her coworker’s eyes was what caused her fist to raise, for the curse to spew from her mouth like bubbling acid.
Today, when she faced him, Scott must have seen that same look in her eyes, for he recoiled as if burned, the twist of his lips untwisting, falling. Her back straightened, her brown eyes burning like flames buried in the core of the earth, a part of her, a part of this earth, a part of the universe — a part of everything. She opened her mouth but no sound arose. She paused for a moment, wondering if it was worth it, if all these years of being beaten, of being brought to this fight without a dog, of her ancestors being forced upon a ship and dragged here, was truly worth it. She was flabbergasted by her own hesitation.
“Yes, Keisha?”
The words left her in a rush, “Have a nice life.”
By now, everyone had gathered into the lobby to see the spectacle, because that’s all a black woman facing down her white oppressor was to them — a spectacle. Scott paused, one brow raising, a hum thrumming from his throat, his mouth a confused line. [In her mind] she raised her hand, brought it towards his face, gripped his long tendrils of wispy blonde hair, and pulled. Pulled as if to drag each follicle out by the root. Pulled as if to yank each racist coil out of his body. Pulled as if to drag his very soul out the planks of his husk, leaving a dry, shriveled, grey pile of slush, exposing the weak, pathetic creature that was S-C-O-T-T.
And she saw the headlines:
ANGRY BLACK WOMAN VIOLENTLY ASSAULTS COWORKER. IS FORCIBLY HAULED AWAY IN CUFFS.
Her mother would cry, would visit her in prison, bringing her hot soup in the wintertime and sweet iced tea in the summer. She would waste her days away, fighting off charges of assault, pleading her innocence in front of a white judge in front of an all-white jury under the penetrating gaze of a white-favoring system. And she could see Scott’s pale white self shivering in the witness stand, whimpering about how he felt violated, assaulted, taken advantage of when he hired her to ‘diversify’ his staff, which really just meant that they didn’t have enough color in the office. Her pleas of innocence (and then — god no — mercy) would fall on deaf ears. She would be a forgotten criminal in a system meant to trap and abuse her.
Inwardly cursing her own cowardice, she extended an arm, holding out her hand in an offering of peace. Scott blinked. She raised a brow.
He extended his arm — and slapped her hand away. “Yeah, and don’t let it happen again or you’ll be out of a job.”
She fixed a smile on her face — you know, that fake, plastic smile, hard as nails — the customer service smile. She needed her job. Meager as it was, that $12.25 temp job was what she lived off of. So she turned away (her ‘week off’ wasn’t over yet) and went home. On the drive home, she played Solange’s Don’t Touch My Hair and cried. No, not cried — sobbed. And when she got home, she sobbed some more. She even cried out in her sleep.
Her neighbors, hearing the wails through the floorboards of their tiny one-bedroom apartment, filed a complaint with the landlord. Things like this happened every day. “It be like that,” her best friend (light-skinned, so without some of the hardships, but still struggling nonetheless) had muttered in response. “There’s nothing you can do about it.” And she fixed that same smile that her friend wore on her face, but you couldn’t see that over the phone.
They were both tired. Tired of playing the perfect black girl — cause, let’s face it, we never earn grown woman-status to them. This same tiredness had come from years of oppression, from slavery to segregation to the 21st century. So many other colored women felt this same wear and tear on their souls. One day, they told themselves, we’ll see change.
But when? In 2030? A hundred years from now? After World War 3? Nah. I’m tired. Lemme take a seat.
And you, Scott? The Keishas of the world think. You take several.
