Beyoncé

Beyoncé by Carter

On the train ride to Hoofddoorp I began to feel it. That nagging feeling like I was going to stand out all day. The day before I had half a mind to call my boss and say forget it. Liz should go. We all know they want pretty, clean white people at this place, and while I do prefer to be discrete, let’s be real. Even if I pulled out all the stops for these folks, I couldn’t blend in. But I told myself to keep an open mind. I needed the money. The 36 euros I was going to earn for an hour and a half of being a tad uncomfortable. I wouldn’t have to work if I had a euro for every time I was the only Black human in a room and felt uncomfortable. I slipped my broken black shoes on and threw my favorite bag over my shoulder, strap about to pop at any moment.

Always carrying a book too many in the thing. I told myself to suck it up, but already on the train ride over it was getting lonely.

L’Oréal’s headquarters is located in a small place outside of Amsterdam that looks like it’s being renovated for capitalism. It appears to be in the middle of nowhere, but you look around and you got the headquarters of all kinds of other big places, headed in the Netherlands to avoid taxes far as I heard. No Black people in sight. I’m thinking, here we go again. Got my game face on. Get ready to act right for white people. This time won’t be no sympathetic eyes for you, only dodged gazes, faces asking how in the world you got in here. And with a visitor’s pass at that. Just be polite and stay positive.

I walked in. The women at the front desk tended to me as soon as my body slid from the revolving door into the building. May we help you?

Sure. I’m Jean’s substitute English teacher. My English made their bodies relax.

She grabbed the phone at her side and cradled the receiver between her cheek and shoulder. Sit there and I’ll ring Jean’s secretary for you. Her finger directed me towards the couches.

Jean’s secretary came down the elevator to escort me up to his office. I didn’t get her name. Jean’s secretary knew I was the English teacher but spoke to me only in Dutch. She told me all about Jean’s busy schedule, and I understood enough to give her the ‘natuurlijks’ she needed to know I was following. Jean was running late, coming in from Belgium. Jean lives in France but travels a lot. Jean can’t be expected to be on time, but I’m expected to be on time and wait if necessary. As we moved down the hallway colleagues tried not to stumble over their conversations as they glimpsed me passing. I told myself not to worry. A lot of White people are actually color-­‐blind. They get their reds and blues mixed up all the time.

Jean was some important dude at L’Oréal but turns out his French accent smothered his English, and he needed someone to come hold the French back a bit. Turns out I speak quite well and I teach quite well, too, so they had to give me a visitor’s pass to the headquarters. I was just subbing. Normally my pretty, clean co-­‐worker taught

Jean, but she was off vacationing in a former Dutch colony. Before she left for Indonesia she told me not to go easy on Jean’s pronunciation. It’s pretty bad. Don’t go easy on the ‘th’s either.

I had Jean read aloud. I corrected the words he didn’t say correctly. Listen. Repeat.

He was a big man at L’Oréal, but even big men these days have to speak decent English I guess. I didn’t necessarily agree with what I was doing, but I did do it well.

My shoes barely protected my feet from Amsterdam’s wet sidewalks. The bag I carried to work was hanging on by threads. I needed the money. Every single one of the 36 euros. Didn’t matter if I had to be the only dark thing that ever walked through that building.

I bet even the cleaning staff was recent eastern European immigrant. I couldn’t feel remnants of color anywhere. Every employee. Every poster on the wall was of a White person. Not even that Garnett Hill cute, milky white, with tight brown curls, green eyes biracial exception type human. Nothing. I was alone at L’Oréal trying to make enough to keep my feet dry.

Listen. Execution. I made Jean read an NPR article about the guilt executioner’s feel as they murder inmates. Repeat. He couldn’t say ‘executioner’ well, but we practiced.

Exe-­‐kU-­‐shun.

Good. Not quite, but they didn’t pay me to work miracles. I got 90 minutes. I wasn’t going to sit there, put this man’s mouth in position or beg. You get one or two tries with me and then we are moving on. Practice at home.

I wrote a list of words with ‘th’ and made Jean say each one several times.

Sometimes I heard ‘S,’ so ‘think’ sounded like ‘sink’. I couldn’t have that. I told Jean to listen to me and repeat. Think. Between pulling teeth I caught a glimpse of a framed poster hanging on his wall in front of me. My attention faded as my eyes brought the image in the poster in focus. It was Beyoncé in a L’Oréal advertisement. Sink continued to echo in the background as I contemplated Beyoncé’s presence. Here we were, just Jean, Beyoncé and me trying to pronounce think. Her face and weave took up the whole poster with ‘L’Oréal’ written in gold letters above her head. There was nothing Black or Brown within miles of this headquarters, but here was Beyoncé with her own frame over this big man’s desk. I stared, wondering how she got there.

Sa-­‐manZa?

Yes, Jean. L’Oréal is a French company. The accent over the ‘e’ hit me then. I never gave it any notice, but with Jean here reading the execution article I understood why he spoke French but needed English lessons at his office in the L’Oréal headquarters.

I hated to state the obvious, but it had never occurred to me until I saw the accent over Beyoncé’s luscious weave. Was Beyoncé a French word, too? How many of my black female friends were out buying L’Oréal mascara at that very moment?

Beyoncé’s poster raised a lot of questions.

Yes. His pronunciation was bad, but my co-­‐worker failed to mention that Jean also had trouble with grammar. After reading the NPR article, I held a discussion section with Jean so he could practice new vocabulary and grammar in spoken English.

Jean, what did you think about the article? Jean spoke, and I corrected him. He tried to explain to me what he believed an executioner’s responsibility was to an inmate on his deathbed. He tried to explain to me that if the executioner felt guilt, then he could not be complicit in such a barbaric system. During the discussion, I noticed Jean had trouble with ‘if… then…’ statements, so I stopped.

It’s if-­‐ past tense, then would plus verb. As in: if I helped kill an inmate, I would feel guilty. Jean nodded, repeated the form then continued reading. If he came across an unfamiliar word, we stopped, and I defined it for him.

Haunt? What is ‘haunt?’

Like if you buy a house, and someone died there, you would say it’s haunted. As in, there are ghosts there. I considered saying and someone had been foreclosed on, but I tried to keep my English lessons rated E. Besides, if I had said ‘foreclosed,’ Jean would not have understood another word and I would have had to explain. They didn’t pay me enough for all that.

Ah, yes.

When we finished the article, I thought the if-­‐then statements were worth more practice. We use them all the time when we speak. I find many students struggle with figuring out what verb should follow and in what tense. I explain to them: present plus future means more possibility. The past plus would means less possibility. That is important. For example, if I say if I quit my job, I won’t have enough money you will think that I am considering quitting my job. If I said if I quit my job, I would not have enough money you would know I have no intention of quitting.

Normally, I practice the form by asking my students silly questions: if you could go anywhere, if you had a million dollars, if you could work anywhere. They enjoy the calm of imagining what could be-­‐ a short escape in English class. But I couldn’t think of any possibility Jean would enjoy imagining. I had to steer clear of things like if you had the money and if you got a free trip, because I imagined he did have the money. I imagined he could buy most airline tickets without feeling the damage in his bank account. To him, perhaps, flights were sort of free. I settled on:

If you could go anywhere right now, where would you go?

Jean stretched out long, rested his back against his chair with his hands supporting his head. He inhaled deep. If I were richer than I am now, he began, which surprised

me, because I tried to indicate it was not about affordances. A smile crept across his mouth. It turns out rich people enjoy imagining more money, too. I would go to Seychelles. Wherever that is.

Why Seychelles? I asked.

It’s quite expensive. There are great hotels there, lots of resorts. I had to take his word for it. Vacations sound different to me these days. I think of rich people using other people’s land to get away from their bad weather once in a blue moon. In Curaçao, for example, the Dutch own a whole chunk of the island that they only use around December. It gets cold in the Netherlands during the winter.

You’d like to visit? I asked.

I have been before. I was surprised. I associate wishes with things you want to do once, not things you want to try again.

If you could have one thing now, what would you have?

If I weren’t paying my children’s tuition fees, Jean began. I waited with excitement.

Jean might have a struggle after all. I would buy a boat and sail the Mediterranean.

Granted, it was grander than my imagination might manage. Buying a boat feels so far from possibility, I wouldn’t even think to list it in my dreams, but there you go.

Jean couldn’t just up and buy that boat. He had to pay his children’s college bills. For a moment, I thought him and I had found common ground. He wanted a boat. I wanted new shoes. Both of us confronted obstacles in achieving those goals.

Great. If you could be anywhere right now, besides in Seychelles or a boat on the Mediterranean, where would you want to be?

At my vacation home in Brittany. Then this man goes on to tell me he has a boat that stays at his vacation home in the north of France.

I thought you wanted to buy a boat?

A bigger boat. My boat is too small to sail the whole Mediterranean. For such feats there are size requirements to which even big L’Oréal men can’t measure up. Who would I be to dream about it? I was just a substitute teacher. I was certainly no Beyoncé.

The next lesson I went to was my last lesson with Jean. As I was waiting, Jean came down to the lobby himself to get me. I was surprised, I was expecting your secretary.

I said as he walked to the elevator that took us to his office.

She’s not here today. He responded, but I saw her coming out of the elevator on my way out of the building when the last lesson had ended. She didn’t seem to recognize

me or care that I had seen her. I avoided eye contact and waved bye to Jean before stepping into the glass elevators. Down to the lobby, a polite good day for my white women holding it down in the front. Back to the Hoofddoorp train station, congratulating myself. You did it. You kept it polite in there. I like to compliment myself every time I act right in front of White people.