April, 2012 – Miami
A black guy in a white T-shirt is sitting in the hearing room next to the magistrate and I wonder what he is doing there. He seems out of place, and I like to be able to make sense out of things. I have an inquiring and curious mind.
The room is tiny, with a long conference table, and the magistrate sits at one end, with a deputy clerk of court at his right hand, and one at his left. As usual, the room holds more people today than its maximum safe occupancy. I don’t know the maximum safe occupancy, but I know that in case of a fire, I would have to shove people out of the way, step over file carts, pocket books, chairs, and the long conference table, and then fight some other people to get to the door. I don’t know how I could shove people out of the way though, because there is no space to shove them into. I always sit in one of the chairs lined up against the walls while I wait for my case to be called, and today I am in a chair near the end of the long table, with a guardian ad litem standing so close in front of me that I must awkwardly look around to avoid looking at his back side, which is right in front of my face.
The black guy in the white T-shirt is sitting near the corner of the table between the magistrate and the left-hand deputy clerk, but he is away from the table just a little bit- a strange place for someone to sit. I wonder if he is in trouble, and I look for handcuffs, but I can’t see his hands. His hair is about a quarter inch long all over. He doesn’t have a fancy haircut- just a short layer of hair, like they do in jail, but he is not wearing jail clothes- just the white T-shirt and dark pants. His chin sports a small, raggedy, tuft of hair, not short enough to make a fashion statement, and not long enough to make any other kind of statement. He doesn’t look bad, but he’s a far cry from GQ too. He just looks like a plain black guy, like you would see hanging around on the sidewalk in front of a sound system store, or sitting on a bench at a bus stop in the predominantly black part of town.
There is no bailiff near the black guy, so he is probably not in trouble. I consider that he may be an observer from some community program. We have four or five new guardians ad litem observing on the other side of the room, so this might just be the day for it. If he is an observer, it’s a shame that they isolate him over by the magistrate, away from the guardians. Maybe he is from a halfway house or a rehab program or a vo-tech or something, and they have started bringing those people over to observe court. I love trying to figure out who strangers are and what they are doing. It is a fun way to pass the time.
The black guy smiles at me.
I have lived in Miami for almost three years, and I still have not gotten used to strange black men smiling at me. Before moving here, I had never had that experience. The first time it happened, a black guy held the door for me at a store, and he looked me right in the eye and smiled warmly, and I instinctively felt a little angry. Who did he think he was to look at me that way? I remembered the old-fashioned word my great grandmother used for certain colored people, “uppity.” But white men look at me that way all the time. It isn’t even flirting. It is just a smile and a nod that recognizes me as a female, and it is so natural as to go unnoticed, from white men. When I realized that I had lived up until now, in a culture where black men don’t look strange white women in the eye and smile at them, it made me very sad. I wondered whether the black men were aware of it, or were they also just accustomed to the way things are.
So today the ordinary black guy in the white T-shirt smiles at me, and I experience that commonly imperceptible, almost non-existent man-woman spark of energy between us that would go completely unnoticed if he were white, and it makes me angry against my will. He did absolutely nothing wrong, but I wonder what he is up to. I half-smile back and look away, thinking that I probably shouldn’t have been looking at him so much. I hope he didn’t think that I was LOOKING at him. Oh for pity sakes.
Then the magistrate introduces everyone in the courtroom to the new guardian observers. The black guy in the white T-shirt is the court reporter. Who knew? Everybody but me apparently. He is sitting where the court reporter would sit. I wish I could get a do-over on the last 20 minutes.
Confessions of a Southern White Woman 