Hanging Her Dirty Linen Out to Dry

The moment he entered the Laundromat, the mood in the room altered drastically. Her face drew tight and her eyes filled with equal parts disrespect and fear. I kept expecting her to pick up the phone and call the police at any moment.

I had flown out to spend two weeks with James in Indiana, in a town called Jeffersonville on the banks of the Ohio River, across the shore from Louisville, Kentucky. James had told me he had dated people here who had ultimately told him that they could never introduce him to their parents because he was mixed (half-black, half-white). Since they were mostly high school relationships, part of me dismissed it as youthful ignorance. But I had to admit that sometimes I noticed people staring at us as if we were an anomaly that threatened them when we would walk around grocery stores or antique fairs with our arms linked or our hands entwined. When he helped me move my things across country, I had gotten pulled over for speeding in Texas and the officer asked me to go sit in his car where he drilled me about the nature of my relationship with James as his canine barked threateningly in the back before issuing me a ticket for going 15 miles over the speed limit.

We had dropped off my clothes at the Laundromat to be laundered on Easter Sunday. James had taken them in for me and paid ahead of time. As we drove away, he said he had noticed some resentment from the woman who took my clothes, as if she was upset that we had come on Easter Sunday; as if we were the reason she wasn’t able to be in church rather than at work. He said he had even apologized that she was stuck there and wished her a happy Easter. I could envision him doing it in the sweet and genuine way he had about him.

As it came time for me to pack to leave a few days later, we went to pick up my laundry. A new woman was there and when I asked her for my clothes, she went to get them and then told me how much I owed her.

“Oh, no. We already paid.”

“Well, I’m sorry, ma’am, but if you had, it would say that here on this receipt.”

“Hold on just a second.”

I walked out to the car to explain to James, trying to figure out what we should do and getting ready to pull the money out of my wallet to pay it again. But James would have none of it. Although he hadn’t said so initially, he had suspected that the resentment he had felt before had been partially racially-motivated and he was taking this as confirmation.

Her entire affect altered the moment James walked in the door behind me. When he began to confront her about this injustice, things turned ugly. As he asked the same questions I had asked before, her tone changed and she began threatening to call the police. I have never felt anything so tangibly dark before or since. She was not talking to him like a human being; she was treating him like a monster. I was baffled. Didn’t she realize to whom she was talking? No one could be more polite or less threatening. I could beat up James before he could even begin to think about harming a woman two times my size. And whatever happened to “The customer is always right?” As time went on, he unwillingly found himself giving her what she wanted, even insulting her intelligence by asking her if she could write when he asked her to write a contract agreeing to ask the woman who had served us before if she recalled us paying and promising to pay us back after making the proper inquiries. As she attacked him from her place of privilege, he did the only thing he could think of to defend himself: attacked her from his. And while that continues to haunt him to this day, I’m sure she only chuckled privately about how she was able to put him in his place.

In the short space of two weeks, I had become aware of multiple areas of privilege that I had been taking for granted. I realized that I have the privilege to go out in public holding hands with people, without worrying what they will think of me. I can ask questions of customer service representatives without them feeling threatened. I have even benefited from educational and career opportunities shut off to James in large part because of the color of his skin, making it much easier for me to swallow my pride and pay for my laundry two different times. As I asked him for permission to write about this experience, he even pointed out a detail that I had not had to concern myself with—he said that he would have grabbed my laundry and peeled out of the parking lot without paying if it had not been for the threatening-looking white man sitting in the window behind us. Because every time James has to muster the nerve to pursue justice for himself, he is forced to scope the place out to make sure it’s safe. And it wasn’t.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.
All men are created equal.
All are granted unalienable rights.
And among them?
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But with these rights come responsibility. Those with freedom must protect their rights from those who seek to expand their own power at the expense of equality and freedom. But above all, is the importance of loyalty. Times of trouble necessitate closeness. For surely we must all hang together or we will undoubtedly hang separately.