All Her Little Secrets

by Wanda M. Morris

Michael was cryptic in his call the night before, maybe because someone else was nearby: Let’s meet in my office in the morning. 6:45. I didn’t press him. He did the same thing last week, a late-night meeting that lasted over an hour. Only we didn’t talk about work. We didn’t even have sex.

But Michael was different, or at least that’s what I told myself. He matched me in every way—height, intellect, and humor. He was my equal except for that pesky little business of a wife and two kids. I was stupid for sleeping with this man. Vera and her friends had a saying: Never get your honey where you make your money.

So Nate was another crusty old white guy, living out his colonial fantasies by shooting up some poor animals out in the wilderness for sport.

Before this conversation, I would have bet my mortgage payment that Nate couldn’t pick me out of a precinct lineup.

Willie Jay was a human wrecking ball that crushed flesh and spirit.

If I were in trouble, Lana would bring a casserole to my house and help me find a good lawyer. Grace would bring a gallon of bleach, a tarp, and a couple shovels.

When Michael touched me, it was like I didn’t have childhood scars or cellulite or an emerging midsection paunch. All my insecurities about those things simply melted away when I was with him.

Sometimes, I wished there were another Black woman who worked in the department. Just anyone else who could pull me from the edge when I wanted to jump down the throat of one of these witches.

Vera would have called this my “God sense” trying to warn me.

Vera used to call the time right after a loved one dies the “bewitching season”—that surreal wedge of time when everyone searches for a new normal but the void is too deep and too raw, leaving you in emotional limbo.

I remember Vera used to say not every husband is truthful with his wife, but every wife knows the truth about her husband. You just know, she would say.

Half the Black people I know can’t trace their lineage past their great-grandparents. Who are my people? My people are his ancestors’ chattel. “Well, I haven’t done my Ancestry.com research, but I suspect my name comes about much like yours. From our shared ancestors, huh? I would love to hear about where your ancestors immigrated from, but maybe we can do that another time.

His question was another example of the “polite racism” of the New South, much like the way Black people in Atlanta coexisted around Confederate soldier statues and venues containing the words plantation and Dixie. The expectation was that such things were harmless symbols of white heritage. They weren’t. They were relics of slavery and a secessionist society that stirred hurtful messages of racism. And now, a board member wanted to know where my family’s slave owners were from.

The so-called New South wasn’t very different from the “Old South”—me and the waitstaff, the only people of color. Surely, this couldn’t be normal in the twenty-first century.

Racism is exhausting and embarrassing, even in front of your best friend, who’s also Black. It’s as if there’s a stealth undercurrent of unwarranted assumptions, petty slights, and dismissals always ready to pop up and reinforce the idea that people of color aren’t good enough, they aren’t welcome.

Some of the people acted like I was the first Black person they’d ever been in the same room with.

God was speaking to me in some kind of way. I just wished I understood what He was saying.

She rolled into Georgia back in 1967 on the Crescent City Line straight out of the Louisiana bayou. As she used to say, The white man blinked and I broke free.

She said she settled in Georgia instead of heading to Chicago where she had family because “they” would have looked for her up there. I never got any details about who was looking for her or why, and Vera considered it disrespectful of children to question their elders.

I missed her so much even though she was right here beside me. The heartache hits different when someone you love so deeply is physically present but mentally a hundred miles away.

Only now, sitting in this office, as its full-fledged occupant, did I fully appreciate the vast divide that charted the us-versus-them landscape of the company. For all Houghton’s talk about family, it was obvious that some members of the clan enjoyed far better perks than others.

I was the queen of screwing up my personal relationships.

White women usually complimented me on my hair when I wore it straight and Black women complimented me when it was coiled.

Since my promotion to the executive suite, I just wore my hair flat-ironed. Another compromise and one less battle to fight. I tried wearing it coiled when I worked in the Legal Department. But it always stirred up an awkward comment, or heaven forbid someone asking to touch it. I envied other women who wore their hair unapologetically natural—coils, curls, kinks, locs—whatever. Women who dared their colleagues to judge them by their worth instead of their crown.

I didn’t care whether he liked me or not, but he would have to contend with the fact that I was his equal colleague now. Some people need to remember you long after you’ve left a room. Especially the people who didn’t think you deserved to be there in the first place.

I listened, but it pissed me off that I had to adjust my behavior to accommodate what was clearly sexist, probably racist, conduct on their part.

What scornful wife hasn’t dreamed about killing her cheating husband and his mistress, too?

Mistakes don’t make nobody bad. It makes ’em human.”

“I’m in HR. I don’t see race. I only see people.” She turned and scanned the room. I rolled my eyes in frustration. If people didn’t see race, they wouldn’t have to go around saying they don’t see race. No wonder there were protesters at the front door of this place.

These days, sleep was a fleeting commodity I could only gather in small fragments between bouts of worry and dread. My life had become too complicated for sleep.

I ambled into the closet, yawned and stretched, and started the daily ritual that had been the same since I was a college freshman with the epic question, What do I wear today? Who would I have to impress? Who would I have to disguise myself for?