Читать книгу Pressure Makes Diamonds - Valerie Graves - Страница 6

Prologue

“Was It Something I Said?”

I could feel the Thing gaining momentum as it came around the table and headed for me. I felt my anxiety rising and briefly wished I’d had another drink instead of stopping at one. I hadn’t thought it wise to get too high, but now that my nemesis was coming my way, a little liquid courage wouldn’t have been bad to have. The Thing had the guys in the room in a frenzy, each one trying to best the man who had spoken before him, and avoid the wrath of the Thing. The Thing was the ferocious one-upmanship my white male colleagues called on to cut each other down to size, to carve out the pecking order. The Thing was an unexpected guest at the big ad agency dinner. Like the popular TV series Mad Men, the advertising agency was a clubby drama full of anxious, driven white men seeking money and power of every sort. Power in the marketplace. Power with clients. Power over colleagues. Power over the few women who had managed to find their way into the business. The quest to gain and wield influence had long since taken on a life of its own. The Thing was its weapon. Tonight, I was the least powerful entity in the crowd: a black girl trapped with the Thing in a room full of madmen.

I racked my brain for something to say that would show I could hold my own. I felt like a schoolmarm in a frat house. In the office, I could opt out of this competition and let my work—created with time and thought—speak for itself. In this intense, liquored-up room, the new girl—in 1976, the office’s only black—had no choice but to show and prove on the spot. As I scanned the crystal and china–laden room, I could see the tension in the bodies of the white-uniformed, brown-skinned waiters and female attendants who looked like my cousins and great-aunts. All evening I had tried to read their averted eyes as they quietly went about their jobs. Now those eyes were all on me, the only black person in the room not serving canapés or drinks. Would mine be the cringe-worthy words of a happy-to-be-here Uncle Tom, or some militant mess that would make the white folks scared and mean? No one knew, least of all me. I was about to perform live at the Bloomfield Open Hunt Club, direct from the Lakeside projects on the shores of Mud Lake. The Thing picked me up and threatened to throw me back into that polluted pond. “Go for what you know, kid,” it snarled. It didn’t give a damn whether I could swim or not. In the grip of the Thing, I said the only words I had been sure would come out of my mouth: “Valerie Graves.” Then, something else safe: “Copywriter.” I looked at my half-drunk colleagues waiting to see if the Thing would drown me, then I listened as the next words tumbled recklessly out of my mouth: “And token.” There was an audible intake of air from both white and black folks, for entirely different reasons, followed by gales of laughter from the agency crowd. My black brethren gave me looks that said, Girl, I hope you know what you’re doing. I didn’t, but whatever it was, the Thing would not take me under that night.

The next morning, the CEO paused as he passed my doorway. “Token, huh?” he said with a beaming smile and an Oh, you’re such a kidder gesture. Two weeks later, I was out of a job. They had other reasons, but reliable sources told me that my quip had sealed my fate. Fuck ’em if they couldn’t take a joke. I had been saying what they wanted to hear my whole damn life.