My Eyes, Opening Wider

At the Goodwill: two Supremes, a man with blood on his shirt, and a hard guy

My post-Harvard year working security at the Morgan Memorial Goodwill Center’s retail store (aka wearing a bogus police uniform and asking customers to show me their sales slips before they exited with merchandise) was, as I’ve written, a crash course in everyday anti-racism. In my case, that meant that I was plunged into a world in which one-dimensional ideas about my Black co-workers and the Black people who patronized the store couldn’t survive my exposure to the variety of life, attitude, character, belief, and values that they displayed every day. But my Goodwill experience opened my mind in other ways too.

Two Supremes

One afternoon a pair of tall, gorgeous Black women in four-inch heels, midi skirts and form-following, flowery tops entered the store—entered it regally, like a pair of Supremes slumming between shows. They greeted Louise B. at the front desk with melodious laughter and leaned against the desk fetchingly as they chattered away with her for a few minutes. Then they glided off into the women’s clothing area.

Louise could see the effect that these goddesses had had upon me, and she beckoned me over.

“Mr. Guard, sir,” she whispered with her usual gently satirical mock-deference (she never called me by my name). “They are something, are they not? And did you know that they used to be boys?”

I felt my eyes widening.

“I mean, they kind of still are, but they are in the process.”

It was my introduction to a major dimension of the South End, where the Goodwill Center was located. I knew it was a neighborhood that had welcomed African-Americans and new immigrants. I knew that some industrial spaces were being renovated for loft homes and artists’ studios, Boston’s version of what was happening in New York’s SoHo. (The gentrification would continue.) Now I knew that it was an area where trans women lived. And when it came to these (to me) very novel people, the same force of familiarity that gave me new perspectives on African-Americans was soon operating.

At least once a week the women, individually or together, would visit the store. When I asked them for their sales slips, they weren’t just polite, they were complimentary. “Honey, I am glad you are here,” one of them might say. “People have got to respect a place like this.” (One of them, Viola, occasionally appeared in male clothing; Louise told me that she sometimes did day labor and needed to masquerade as a he-man.) Soon they, and other trans patrons, became everyday people for me. I was far too nervous and self-conscious to befriend them or even ask them about their lives, but any lingering feeling of unease I might have in their presence melted away in the dailiness.

The Bloody Shirt

There were less edifying lessons that I had to learn as well. One afternoon, a wildly unkempt, fiftyish white guy with a cut on his head and blood trailing down his face to the collar of his grimy yellow shirt came staggering in the door, and then right up to me.

“I’m really sorry,” he said, “but I need some help. I just got rolled out there. They hit me and got my wallet.”

My stomach grew cold as I realized that this was a genuine security-guard-type situation, more urgent and existential than peering at sales slips. I had no idea what to do.

Luckily, Belle R., the motherly Jewish woman who supervised the housewares section of the store, was right at hand.

“Sir, there’s a walk-in clinic on T---- Street,” she said. “Do you know how to get there? It’s only about four blocks away.”

“I don’t know,” the guy stammered.

“Well, here it is,” said Belle. She took one of the sales flyers stacked on the front desk, turned it over, and wrote down the clinic’s address. “And I’ll call and say you’re coming.”

“Thank you, thank you,” he whispered, and then: “I wonder if you guys could let me borrow a clean shirt.”

“Sorry,” said Belle. “We can’t do that. Only purchases here.”

“See, the thing is, they took my money, and…”

“Only purchases, sir. I’m sorry.”

That seemed cold to me. We were a social service agency, weren’t we? So I piped up.

“Belle, I’d be happy to buy a shirt for this gentleman.”

Belle held up a hand to stop me, and shook her head.

“Here you are, sir,” she said, handing him the flyer with the clinic address. “You’ll get the help you need over there. Good luck.”

The bloody-shirt man, still looking stupefied, turned and made his uncertain way out the door.

When I frowned at Belle, she shook her head again. “I know, I know. But we couldn’t do it.”

“But I could have—”

“No you couldn’t,” she said. “You don’t know how he got that head wound. If he got it committing a crime, like an assault, and you helped him get a different shirt than he was wearing when he committed it, you would have changed his appearance, changed his description. That would turn you into an accessory after the fact, and they could arrest you.”

And that’s how I learned some of the legal limits of altruism.

Lee and Andre

And then there was Lee T. He was short, powerfully built, Black, and one of the parolees who worked in the mattress-rehab shop upstairs.

As comfortable as I got in the job, I could never be entirely sure if a youthful, utterly unimposing white rent-a-cop like me was a symbol of oppression, a figure of fun, or both. Lee seemed to want me to believe that he took me seriously as an oppressor, and he seemed determined to remind me that he was a hard-guy ex-con.

He would come down on a lunch break, stand near me, and fix me with a deadly stare for a few minutes. Then he would walk very slowly past me, saying to no one in particular, “I’m going to lunch, if the screw will let me out.”

Back from lunch, he would make sure to stop in the door, throw that stare my way again, and say, slowly and in a very loud voice, “Comin’ in the door, boss,” as if I were the overseer of his chain gang.

I had, of course, no way of knowing the indignities the man had suffered, or, for that matter, the crimes he had committed; but my reaction to Lee was one of simple dread. The imminence of him coming down in the elevator to address me with that old-fashioned term for prison guard—screw—along with the rest of his routine, made every lunch hour upsetting.

And then one day, when Lee came down he just stood by the front desk without even glancing at me. In place of his black jeans and the blue t-shirt that showed off his massive biceps to such good advantage, he was wearing a dark-blue blazer, crisply-pressed tan slacks, and spit-shined dress shoes.

And he was nervous.

Louise let out a little whistle and said “Looking good, Lee.”

“My son, meeting me for lunch,” he said.

“Your boy knows that you’re out,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah. We’re gonna reconnect, you know? He’s a man now.”

And Lee stood there uneasily, rocking a little, back and forth, heel to toe, until a young, slim Black man, maybe twenty, with tight, perfect cornrows and wearing a shiny silver shirt, entered the Goodwill.

Lee opened his arms. “André,” he said. “Wow.”

The young man didn’t move. Then he nodded, once.

More silence as Lee lowered his arms.

“Okay,” said Lee.

Then: “We going to lunch or what?”

“Yeah,” said André.

And he turned to precede Lee out the door.

When they were gone, Louise raised her eyebrows and nodded a little back and forth, as if to say “Delicate. Delicate.”

It was about a half-hour later that father and son returned, with André still in the lead. His face was tense and his eyes seemed unfocused. Lee followed him in, looking at the floor, his hands balled up in fists.

Then he raised his head to look at his son.

“So,” he said in a voice he was working hard to keep even. “We can do this again. I can come around. And you can come around. You know where I’m staying.”

“Mm,” replied André, in a tone that said nothing more than “Yes, I know where you’re staying.”

Long pause.

“Okay then,” Lee said at last, and André pivoted and was out the door.

When Lee then turned around to head for the elevator, I got a glimpse of his eyes. They were not wet, but they shone with an intensity of sorrow and frustration. They were like mirrors of the struggles, mistakes, rages, humiliations, and hopes of Lee’s forty-plus years as a Black man in a hard-ass American city. And today, of unrequited love.

To be continued…