A Weird Experiece :: Personal Narratives Violence Crime Essays

A Weird Experience We were a trinitysome that of late pass. Friday afternoons when doubting Thomas got home at a decent hour he called on the intercom and I went shore the hall to their flatbed for drinks. sometimes when he was late Krystal knocked on my door and asked me to come on use up and keep her company. Later we might go out to dinner. Or we skipped dinner and just twaddleed and listened to music. Sometimes on Saturdays he took his car and we drove down the Jersey shore or up the Hudson Valley or to Connecticut. in one case we went out to The Hamptons where they were looking for a vacation house. Our friendship lasted exactly three months. A lucky number, Krystal said of the three of us. The perfect number. Thomas Milton was an investiture banker. After getting his Masters from Harvard Business School, hed returned to New York to a study firm and at 32 years old had already make $100 million, or close to it. Thomas was tall, handsome, charmingand Jamaican. His beaut iful video model wife, Krystal, was Dominican and rich in her own right. The Miltons had just bought and were remodeling a penthouse in a nearby Central Park West apartment building and would soon be moving from the cooperative. Inevitably we ended up talking about what I was calling in those days the big American dividerthe color line. Not that Thomas and Krystal initiated our discussions they said speed didnt matter. No, it was I, the white liberal for whom race does matter, who turned an everyday conversation into a social study. I think they were embarrassed at my endless talk about such an immutable situationthey were disconsolate and basta, as Thomas once said soon after we met. And in general, he said, people are racists. Thats just the way things are. Yet with each racial diss encountered, with each new racist attack reported on TV, with each new case of police humiliation, I returned to the attack. Relentless, I forced them to participate. How long, I asked piously, this chasm between whites and blacks? Why the fears? Why the silence? I often asked that winter why race had to change our relationship? Change everything? And deprive me of what I above all neededtheir respect. One evening after a number of cocktails in the sprawling salon of their big 10th deck apartment I asked them point blank what it was like being black here in the city.