One Day at a Time

A Story by Marjani

A woman works her way out of the system only to be toppled by it.

Money was something I didn’t care for--unless I had some. I was the girl with the heart of gold; one of the good ones who understood what was truly important by conducting my life accordingly. Then I started making money that only the highly educated, silver spoon fed, and ultra-privileged classes were entitled to and my perspective on life changed. I found truth in the fact that the rich can’t afford to take on the burdens of the poor, lest they find themselves relieved of their riches without even so much as a “thank you and kiss my a*s” echoing in the distant hollows.

“Sipping Mai Tai’s on a beach someplace in Tahiti.”

‘Or Bora Bora,’ I said in my mind, remembering Mara’s words to me when I went to work for her. It was a lofty and ambitious goal for a young black girl born to two drunks from the backwaters of Alabama and the outer limits of Creek nations driven into Oklahoma. Born with nothing, I was supposed to die with nothing; thereby honoring the fates and legacies of a wagPlease No Javascript of ancestors who had already passed on before me.

That small world in the window was burdened to the core with a series of social land mines, sand traps, downhill economic campaigns fought on mounds of quicksand, and piss-drunk drug addicts who were the company misery loved the most. The bad news was that the word “statistic” was ascribed to me from nearly the moment I was born. The good news was--I had no plans to help it stick.

“Don’t you get tired of sitting on this back stoop in this dismal town lamenting over the s****y circumstances that you didn’t ask to be born into?”

I looked over at my friend and next door neighbor in the projects, Ana Esquilin. She was from Puerto Rico--a woman who spoke a mixture of broken English and her native language when she was excited--running from a man who had abused her coming and going until she finally got sick of it, and him, and finally bailed.

“Oh, it not going be like dees always, honey bunny…somehow, I know det Saint Toribio Romo will make a way and coming turn dees ting around.”

Her words fell on the hopeful ears of a girl devoid of the heart to believe it. I’d heard the song all my life, “one day at a time, Sweet Jesus, that’s all I’m asking of you…” but the ‘one day’ wasn’t moving fast enough for me. I, like many other young black women of my time, did not have my choice of select well-paying jobs to choose from, and slave work in a post-slavery world wasn’t something I was willing to wake up and crawl out of my Goodwill bed for every morning. After the Civil Rights Movement blew over, a certain prestige and measure of security blew in, in the form of government jobs and nursing; but it was either that, or sign up for the military. One wasn’t available very often and the other wasn’t a viable option when there was a small child abandoned by his father to consider.

Jackleg and storefront preaching was reserved for men, and the more industrious and resourceful amongst us built in-home businesses as bootleggers, sold backyard barbecue plates or homemade ice cream cones on Sundays, did hair, cut hair, ran whorehouses up the hill, or juke joints down in the cut. Others found ways to cheat a man out of his daily or weekly earnings in a thinly-sliced white bread game of street dice or card-playing that often ended in gunfire and the untimely deaths of the gamblers. Then, there was always the obligatory only black florist, only black barber, only black-owned mom-pop one-stop corner general store, or the only black mortician, in town.

“Yeah, I know,” I smiled for her bravery if nothing else. “Sometimes, it seems like the world thinks we aspire or at least conspire to become lifelong dependents on the system, as if some of us aren’t good enough to fall in love or want to be married and have families of our own like any rich woman would.”

“We-el, Mees Renee, ju know dees may or mightn’t be true, but si, it do seem like eet true some time.” Ana was a big Hispanic woman who often snorted whenever she walked, twisting each leg around as if her own weight was too much for her to bear.

Soon after, Ana bootstrapped herself into a minimum-wage no-benefit job at The Krystal. She went crying back home to her mother in El Paso when she could no longer afford decent food or a place of her own with her meager paychecks. If her baby got sick, she was s-o-l. Her job offered no medical or dental benefits for a year and Medicaid cut her off within six months after she started working. The old saying “when you’ve hit rock bottom, the only place to go is up” was not exactly true. Ana had definitely gone down, from that special place called rock bottom.

“Hey, chick!” Eleanor Stringer waved at me as I hung hand-washed clothing out on the lines to dry. She had moved into Ana’s old apartment and often reeked of the smell of liquor, cigarettes, and the tart smell of light hints of beer sipped first thing in the morning. She drank so much that a shower couldn’t take the porous odor out of her skin. I cringed at the sound of her voice, and at the idea of being called “chick.” I was no child of a mother hen and didn’t appreciate being referred to as such.

Taught by an overly-accommodating grandmother to be polite at all times, I smiled through my clenched but very polite teeth and waved back at her, being that it was the neighborly thing to do and all that. I was glad to have the clothespins to blame for the grit and grimace plastered on my face. She moved the liquerish B.O. closer to me as I pulled the plastic pins out of my cloth arm bag and placed them between my teeth, grasping the edges of crib sheets and cloth diapers and hoping that the cloth billowing in the warm wind would wave it off in another direction.

“Uhm, lawdy…I do love the smell of freshly washed laundry flapping on a clothesline in the summer breeze. What’s that you be using on your clothes--Downy^TM, or something like that?”

“Something like that.” I say, keeping my answers brisk and my teeth pressed together while I spit out another clothespin and cast a shadow of a smile in her general direction.

Here we go again with the every-other-day backyard small talk and I hated what I had become. I had grown up during kinder times when female companionship was the only cure for loneliness on country roads. People loved company, gossip, and talk about topics that I considered boring. I didn’t want to talk about laundry detergent or fabric softener, or recipes, or the best way to remove cooked-on stains from a porcelain stove top--my damn name wasn’t Aunt Jemima--and it definitely wasn’t freakin’ Hazel.

It wasn’t overnight that I’d come to feel like I was living someone else’s regimented life, compressed, and with my edges cut off to force my square peg into round holes. If I was forced into someplace where I didn’t belong, with something or someone that didn’t belong, I would never be a good fit. Gaps and holes would always be there, and they couldn’t be stuffed with socks, toilet paper, or even silly putty, rocks, or scraps of Bible verses.

Within a month after deciding I was a bad fit for that town, I sold the last of my earthly belongings and, along with my 9-year old son, Eric, my used tan Chysler with the dark brown seats, a degree encased into a plastic ID card and my college transcripts, I headed ‘up nawth’—to Atlanta. It was as far into the city as I could go on a country mouse’s income.

Too much of my time was spent in the jailhouse of segregated surroundings. Black folk had a place to keep in Columbus and they mostly kept to it. They hardly ever ventured outside of those boundaries without being in the presence of some charitable and benevolent white person.

Atlanta was the flip side of that broken record. In the A-T-L, blacks defied set boundaries, dared anyone to put limitations on them without expecting a fight, and where they ventured where they ‘shouldn’t be’ just to test Civil Rights law and see who was up to the challenge of trying it on for size.

My goal, upon arrival, was to double my old salary within a year. My first job interview was with Apple One. I proudly clutched the newly earned administrative degree and awaited the good news. Surely the agency had searched long and hard for someone just like me to fill an excellent position with decent pay and bene’s.

“Oh, you’ll never ever make more than seven dollars an hour in the life of your career,” the British recruiter told me when I wrote down my expected salary requirement.

I didn’t think starting somewhere just under twenty-one thousand a year was unrealistic. I left Columbus at seventeen thou. Our conversation ended abruptly and he never heard from me again.

Three days later, I began work at MetLife, making close to eleven—an hour. I was tempted to fax my first pay stub to the b*****d at Apple One, but I decided that personal vindication was enough for me.

***

Mara’s words, “sipping Mai Tai’s in Tahiti” fell on deaf ears. I knew she was lying when she said it, being a habitual liar by force of habit.

A briefcase full of freak circumstances in which I was unceremoniously fired for being the “n****r” that a white paralegal refused to train, the “gal” a white office manager didn’t have time to train, and a scooped up reject by a law firm that hired five white girls who quit within a week to 30 days before they finally decided to give me a try after there were no other takers, had brought me to this place. Mara promised me the sun, the moon, and the stars in exchange for my now widely-sought after closing skills.

I decided to take a shortcut to my perceived big bucks by getting some post-grad paralegal training. After graduation and the first few flop jobs where my race was used as an issue and an excuse to make an a*s of me, I was finally offered the coveted thirty-five thousand a year grand prize salary. It was supposed to make me happy, feeling settled and smugly satisfied. Problem was, I’d become a little too good at the game and neck-hanging albatrosses fell in blind love with me on first sight.

Real estate paralegals, or what the good ol’ boys referred to as closing secretaries, were “worth their weight in gold,” they said. “You’re only as good as your closer,” attorneys told one another over the phone as they passed us ‘good -gals’ around and between each other.

The ones who had the game down pat acted like world-class b*****s. The office divas who carried the gold crown of first-rate top-notch closer in a real estate market flooded with hot prospects were not only handed the Christmas turkey, but much more in the way of monthly bonuses and fast-tracked annual salary increases. The upcoming Summer Olympic games made the pot that much sweeter.

At the outset, they did everything in their power to shut me out, but I wasn’t having it. Atlanta--birthplace, home, and final resting place of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.--had taught me well to “kick a*s and take names later.”

I checked out books, read every pica inch of information I could get on real estate law and transactions, then made my first stabs at online research before Google existed. It was during this time that a fledgling upstart internet service provider, America Online, had underestimated the flood of response to unlimited online access that they couldn’t deliver on. From that persistent endeavor grew the litmus test that would forever expose and label me a fraud, or so I feared.

I lied to a law firm about my skill set just so I could get in the door and prove I wasn’t stupid. Id’ learned enough to speak the language of the pros, so I told them I could do it all when I knew damn well I was betting on self-taught book knowledge only. The day came when I sat at computer land taking an emergency crash course in balancing and disbursing checks. The attorney whose closing I just finished came to my desk looking for his checks. He wanted to disburse and get those ghastly smelly Jeds and Jethros out of his office, quickly.

I had not the foggiest idea how to make those checks balance in Landtech, or how to print them on the checks neatly laid out on my dot matrix. He bent over, studied the frantic “I’m trying, but it just won’t balance itself” look on my face, then stood up straight. Amazingly enough, he smiled—didn’t panic, didn’t scream or yell or throw things as I had seen other attorneys do, just turned away patiently.

“No better way to learn than by getting your hands on it.”

He then asked one of the other closers, Marlene, the lady with that Reba McEntire twang, to come over and show me how it’s done. Good thing I was a fast learner.

I took off from there and became, almost overnight, the firm sensational closer—doubling the amount of closings I could do in one day, plus doubling my production for the month. I also made myself useful in every department where help was needed. It was how I learned ‘the ropes,’ garnering a fast reputation as one of the best in the business. I swung on high stars with recommendations from every attorney in whose office I worked.

That’s how Mara first heard of me. Word of mouth, reputation, front line attorney gossip about the “good ones” and how lucky they were to have them. “Either the devil or a benevolent godfather is in the details,” they said; so she called and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse--in writing, no less.

How much closer to career Utopia, I asked myself, could an unconnected, non-nepotismic (my word), and disenfranchised black girl with a limited degree who was once told she was not worth more than seven dollars, get? Back of it all, I’d met the man of my dreams and we were about to celebrate our fourth year of wedded near-bliss.

***

The words “return embezzled funds” vibrated silently from the email to my eardrum and then to my hypothalamus. I looked up the word defalcated on dictionary.com. Somehow, between 10 p.m. on a Friday night and 9 a.m. the next Saturday morning, Mara and Tracy, her partner-husband, the same people who begged me to stay on a contract job that I was determined to quit, decided that I’d embezzled funds from their escrow account.

She was very explicit in her language detailing what would happen if I attempted to re-enter the Concourse towers, or their private offices—the same offices that I’d paid for with my own labor and legal industry contacts. They described me to security, it read, and my belongings, the personal effects from my desk drawer, were with the officers in the dungeon of the building. I could pick them up there and be on my merry little way forever.

I woke my husband from a deep sleep, one of those rests that he rarely got because he was habitually restless at night. It was important. He sat up in bed to read the email I’d printed out, then shook his head.

“What else can you expect from their kind?”

“I can’t sit back and let them get away with a serious accusation like that,” I told him.

“No one said you had to,” he cleared his throat and possibly the cloud fog formed in his head. “Of course not—why would you? I certainly wouldn’t let them get away with it. That kind of a lie could put you out of business for good.”

I curled up on the edge of the bed and put my ever-cold tootsies under the toasty comforter. “I wonder if I did do something wrong and just didn’t realize it.”

He sat up higher and propped himself against the headboard.

“Didn’t you just tell me two weeks ago that they had an audit with the title company and that you passed it with flying colors? Why would you go second-guessing yourself like that because they decided to get rid of you after you’d already decided to quit?”

“They could have just told me to leave. This accusation was totally unnecessary.”

He shook his head. “You have a written contract, do you not?” I nodded in the affirmative. “They had to find a way out of it. Saying bye-bye and good luck wasn’t enough.”

“But why?”

“Who knows? Maybe they felt they were paying you too much money, baby—especially after you turned down their offer of permanent employment when they were trying to give you more work for less pay.”

“They didn’t even work for the 90-percent they got.”

“That doesn’t make you any less expendable; it’s their firm. We discussed this after Mara got drunk and said something about the two of you sipping Mai Tai’s on the beach. We both knew that was never going to happen—they’re too greedy and selfish to be that generous with you for any extended period of time.”

Tears welled, but my husband had seen me cry one time too many. I wasn’t about to do the female thing and wimp out on such an important business matter. Lies or no, he did strike one hunky chocolate-covered muscle-bound handsome figure underneath the thin coverlet between the bottom sheet and the comforter. He had strong arms that I needed around me, but I was a big girl—a tough cookie. I can handle this.

They started a war they weren’t going to finish, so in my estimation--f-‘em. I had to be about business, so I had to move defensively, before they cost me all. An accusation of that caliber registered high on the social Richter scale, and it was nothing to tell myself not to worry about. My reputation was at stake because I’d made what I believed to be the right decision at the time, and a well-deserved one at that. I had their agreement with that in writing.

Attorney Dan Meachum, upon hearing my story, agreed to take my case. Bounty hunters in Atlanta, in the state of Georgia for that matter, were hard to find, especially for the price of another lawyer’s head on a platter. They typically stuck by unwritten pacts between them not to ever sue one another under any circumstances, but he made an exception, he said, for white attorneys, especially, in his own words, “shyster jews.”

Reggie and I took the ride home in near-silence after the meeting with Meachum. My voice penetrated the “think and reflect” moment we were currently experiencing.

“I wonder what’s going to come of this? Maybe I’m just wasting my time and my money. They’re attorneys after all, attorneys always win when it comes to the lower mainstream public. As John Grisham said in one of his novels, we’re just ‘lowly’ paralegals, you know.”

“Oh yeah?” my husband raised one brow and cocked his head to one side to look at me, as if he fully expected my cooperation in maintaining hope and light at a dark tunnel of my life. “Well, I’d rather you be a lowly paralegal than a low-life lawyer.”

He was right. It was just another day and a Mai Tai sounded awfully good. Reggie didn’t drink and didn’t encourage me to drink, but that night he pulled the car into the parking lot of the Blue Waters café-ristorante near Lenox at Phipps and let me order one in honor of the long road ahead. There, I made a toast just for them, “Thank you, and…”