by Aaron Samuels
I am in Richmond Virginia at a company training that feels
like nerd camp, and Rodrigo the program manager says that
the punishment for showing up late in the morning is that the
next morning you have to show up early and serve him
breakfast and we nod in agreement and think this makes sense,
that there should be a punishment for showing up late and that
waking up the next morning is reasonable and Rodrigo would
be up anyway to eat the all expenses paid breakfast buffet
provided daily at the Wyndham hotel in Virginia that was
rented in its entirety to fly the best and the brightest twenty
two year olds from all around the world to learn advanced
business skills and there is sunlight in every window.
Four years ago I was scrubbing coffee stains off of tables at
Little Falls Bakery and Café but now my friends make fun of
me when I tell them I used to work in the breakfast industry,
that I had the responsibility of starting morning in my
neighborhood.
The hotel is a series of mansions behind a gated fence and an
egg shell shatters in my stomach and there is not one yellow
blade of grass on this plot of land. I know from my textbooks
what a plantation looks like and I don’t know if I am in a
dream or in a worse place and it is breakfast time and I am a
Black man wearing tight pants and a button down shirt and I
have lost more melanin in the last six months than I have
gained and I cut off all of my hair to create PowerPoint
presentations and eat breakfast that I did not cook myself.
And I do not see anyone on the hotel staff that is not Black. I
wonder if that adds to its authenticity, to a timeless place
where breakfast is always hot and you never have to lift a
spatula, unless you are late, and have to serve Rodrigo
breakfast, a true punishment for a man who has never cooked
breakfast for another man,
The humiliation
of carrying a plate,
of smelling like food,
of an apron,
of the warm stomach of a kitchen,
of placing metal beside metal,
of watching silently,
of another person enjoying your labor,
of walking with the Wyndham Virginia staff,
to be among a people who are not supposed to be
your own, to do a job that does not require tight pants
or a button down shirt.
And I am the only Black person to start working at my
company this year, and I believe I am the only person at my
company who ever chose to work in the breakfast industry,
and I think that this punishment may be a punishment for
everyone but it is not a punishment for me, for me to serve, for
me to make breakfast with my people, for me to walk with the
ghosts who still live on this plantation and apologize for
pretending to be something different, for every skinny tie and
every knotted shoelace,
and would apologize to them all, for the fact that Rodrigo
thinks this is punishing me, that as a business man I would be
so ashamed of serving as a food worker that this would deter
me from showing up late to my morning session, that there
could be no punishment greater than to be reminded of the
future I may have had, in a universe not too far, and not too
long ago, and right now,
And I never showed up late.
Aaron Samuels is the author of Yarmulkes & Fitted Caps, released by Write Bloody Publishing. He is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Asylum Arts, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Samuels is a founding member of the Dark Noise Collective and ranked 3rd place at the Individual World Poetry Slam. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he serves as Co-Founder and COO of Blavity, Inc.
