“We’re consultants,” said Martha, flicking an irritated look at me, servant speaking out of turn. “Workplace efficiency. But like I said, it’s as much a personal call as anything. I just wanted to say hi.”
I pressed my hands together while the blonde said “Hmm” a couple more times and went back to murmuring into her phone.
I stood and waited and grinned and looked at the floor, fighting back against the simple, sick, vertiginous awareness of where I was, where exactly. I was tottering on the rim of it. Through those doors. Up those elevators. Behind these three towers…
I was breathing very slowly. Martha stared into the expanse of the lobby, and I could not guess what she was thinking. We were deep in character, and I’d taken us into this place, and I could feel the terrible weight of it pressing my flesh, and when the receptionist looked up again and smiled, her red-lip smile was the wide, burning grin of the devil.
“You’re in luck,” she said to Martha. “He is here, and he’ll be right out.”
“Oh, isn’t that nice,” said Martha. “That’s just perfect.”
“Yes.” She sniffed. “Your Negro will need to be cleared.”
Again, as at the border. Scalp and armpits, teeth and tongue; pants down, shirt up. They had a room for it, just off the lobby, and an attendant, a tired-looking free black man who scowled and said nothing as he ran his clumsy fingers over my body. I stood absolutely still. I held my arms out. It would have been the school at Bell’s, the first time, the first of such searches I had endured in my life. Lesson 1: your body is not your own.
This place, this plantation, was on a different order from Bell’s. Physical size and scope of work, a different universe of slavery from the little three dozen acres where I’d been raised. Green grass, farm country, pig lots, cattle pens, silos. The world I was about to enter was a twenty-four-hour operation, ultramodern and ultraefficient, with computerized inventory tracking and comprehensive worker-control protocols. There was a camera in the upper left corner of the room, bearing cold witness to the man and me. I was here and I was there at the same time, feeling this tired guard’s hands on my chest at the same time as I was feeling the rough hands of the guards at Bell’s, a lifetime ago.
This is so much worse, I thought, and immediately thought, No, no, nothing could be worse. But it’s a waste anyway, isn’t it, the idea of comparison, just in general. Holding up one kind of horror against another.
“All right.” The bored security man broke his silence, straightening up, pulling off his gloves and chucking them into a bin. “Bag now.” Quickly he opened the rolling suitcase I was hauling, rifled through that, too—a change of clothes for Martha, change of shoes, and a laptop turned off, which he opened and closed uninterestedly.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re clear.”
But then before I could lower my arm he wrapped something around the wrist, a thin strip of paper, bright green, which secured to itself, tight as hell, tugging at the small hairs of my arm.
“That is an identification bracelet,” said the man. “That identifies you as a Person Bound to Labor and a member of our staff.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Whoa, whoa.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll come back through here again on your egress from this facility. But every dark-skinned person is required to wear a band while on the grounds.” He showed me his own bracelet, which was a cool red.
“But don’t you have a color for folks like me? Negroes like me, just—just here for a visit?”
“No, man, we don’t.” His voice was dry, humorless. “We don’t actually get too many of those.”
Martha was waiting for me in the lobby, laughing with her hand on the arm of a short, fat white man in a sport jacket, who was laughing, too. This was Newell—instantly recognizable from his picture on the company website, where we’d found him yesterday afternoon on an old laptop belonging to the lawyer’s people, making our plan.
It was Martha who pointed to him—to his weak-chinned, sappy, smiling head shot, his sad-sounding title and anemic history within the company. There’s the guy. There’s the guy we want.
And now here he was, the guy we wanted, dumpy and thin-haired and pink-cheeked, in casual slacks and polished shoes, with one of Martha’s hands on his forearm, the both of them laughing like old pals.
“Well, of course I do,” Matty Newell said hopefully. “You’re not the kinda gal a fella’s gonna go and forget.”
“I do like to think so,” said Martha, her laugh a tinkling falsehood. “I surely do.”
“You caught me in a good mood, too, I must say. A good week for us, darn good week.”