Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [143]
“I want to be there.”
“Okay.” I said finally.
She stopped and focused on me.
“I can’t help but notice, Mister Wopplesdown,” she said, pronouncing it correctly with mock formality, apparently teasing me over my constant referrals to her as ‘Ms. Waboombas’. “That your solution to this problem is money oriented.”
“Not money, no. The money gets me next to Wisper, sure. But the rest is up to me.”
“Mmm,” Ms—Wendy said, nodding slowly, apparently not convinced.
“I understand what you’re getting at…Wendy. But I do know not all my problems can be solved with a simple outlay of cash.”
She still didn’t seem to be buying it. I looked off into the distance to give it some thought, and immediately regretted doing so as my eyes fell on a particularly large and incredibly hairy man happily lumbering and swinging my way. He looked like a naked Hagrid.
“Money can be the easy answer, sometimes,” I said, quickly returning my attention to Wendy. “It’s hard to get away from. Sometimes you feel trapped by it. Like a tar baby.”
Her tone and expression suddenly became more focused, and a bit stern.
“A what?” she asked.
“A tar baby. Haven’t you ever heard those fairy tales?” I asked, missing her change of mood and expression. “When you were a kid?” “Why don’t you tell me about them,” she said quietly.
“Well, there’s this fox, right? And he wants to trap this rabbit that’s bothering him. So the fox, he makes a baby out of tar, right? And leaves it on the side of the road. So when the rabbit comes by, he tries talking to the baby—which, I guess, isn’t really a baby, it’s more like a kid—and when the kid doesn’t respond, the rabbit gets annoyed and starts pushing on him and roughing him up a bit, and before long, he’s wrapped up in sticky goo, and there’s nothing he can do to get out.”
“And what makes br’er fox know br’er rabbit is going to get rough with the tar baby, Corky…?” she asked, smiling, though her voice felt measured, restrained. “…Just because the baby won’t talk to him?”
“Well,” I said, never having given it a moment’s thought before, seeing as it was just a children’s story, and I’d been just a child listening to it. Even as an adult, I hadn’t always bothered with why things happened the way they did. That’s why I liked Michael Bay movies. “I don’t know, I suppose he…”
It was then that I really took in all of Ms. Waboombas, or rather, all of Wendy. Tall, stately, her dark skin standing out in stark relief against the crowd. Here and there behind her I could see other, darkskinned bodies, but mostly the majority of the crowd was pink and pale, or at best evenly tan, though very few were anywhere near as dark as she. It made her stand out plainly for obvious reasons.
And hit my like a brick.
“Because…he was…black?” I asked. Not really asking, more realizing and dropping an insincere question mark in at the end to show I’d just learned something unexpectedly profound from a stripper.
“Could be,” she said, obviously not thinking there were any other possible reasons.
“It’s a racist story,” I said, horrified at my own ignorance.
“Most of Uncle Remus’s tales are.”
“I’m sorry, Wendy. I didn’t mean anything…”
“I know you didn’t,” she said, smiling. “I got a pretty good idea who you really are by now, Corky.”
“Still…”
“Still,” she said. “The thing you need to take away from this moment is this; that sometimes the reason people from different worlds prefer to associate only with other people from those same worlds is: you don’t get them accidentally saying stupid shit like that.”
I swallowed hard, supremely humiliated.
“And if people want to cross into other worlds, then they need to see that sometimes shit like this is going to happen, and you have to have the strength to step back and see the intent. See if whoever said it is really a jerk racist, or just a dumbass.”
“I’m just a dumbass,” I told her.
“No, you’re not. You’re just not too deep. But I think we’re starting to move out of the shallow end of the pool now with you, aren’t we?”
I nodded rapidly.
“Yeah. And I can see how embarrassed you are by what you said.