Congratulations !
You have been awarded points.
Thank you for !
- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Drama / Human Interest
- Subject: Relationships
- Published: 06/29/2018
Mirrors for Class Journal
Born 1959, F, from Wichita, Kansas, United StatesIt is an unusual winter day in Wichita Kansas. The sun is intense like its summer time and many wear colorful tops. The only difference with today’s sun is that it often whacks you with chilly wind gusts. Mati Hoper bounces out of her Minnesota Street apartment in North East Wichita. She has a smile on her lips. She will cook dinner for Jimal Williams, her boyfriend, and she is going to Wall Mart to buy groceries. Jimal has just been released from Sedgwick County Jail. She frowns recalling the trial. The judge had raised his brows when the defense lawyer said that Jimal was at the “right place at the wrong time.” He was too early for work at QuickTrip in his neighborhood and was hanging out near the store. Police officers arrived and rounded up young men in the area; they said that there was a robbery. He was in jail for six months before the trial began. Even though they let him go, he felt that the system was unfair to him by keeping him in jail for that long “for doing nothing ‘cept being black.” Mati insisted that they needed to be positive and celebrate his homecoming; after all some of the others are still in police custody. She will buy sweet potatoes, green peas and corn flour for baking corn bread, which is his favorite. She cheers up.
Mati turns left into 17th Street and notices that a police car is behind her. She is driving within the speed limit of thirty five miles per hour. Anyway, she can’t afford to speed because the cracks and holes on the road slow you down. Her papers are correct and her car is in good condition, “cept the rear sounds like wind from stomach flu.” She believes that the police cannot arrest her for a noisy automobile. Yet she panics.
“I have done nothing wrong,” she assures herself and smiles, but the smile is suddenly wiped off her face as police car lights come on signaling that she should stop. She stops the car, raises her hands and fixes a broad smile on her face to show that she is happy with the police officer. Her mind goes to the police shooting of an unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown of Ferguson, in the neighboring State of Missouri. The young man was killed “just for doing nothing ‘cept being black.” Her heart begins to beat like that of a horse galloping a hill.
Mati usually shows all her teeth whenever she meets an authority figure as proof that she does not fit the profile of an angry black person. Her one year as a student at Wichita State University has given her the opportunity to perfect her grinning style. Majority of the professors and other authority figures are white. The university has also enabled her to take courses that sharpen her critical thinking about her situation as a full-bodied short black woman with big curly hair. Jimal likes her full breasts, butt, large bold eyes and bushy hair, but these characteristics are not included in the beauty usually portrayed in the media. She always tries to convince herself that media beauty is not the only beauty, as Jimal says. He may be an uneducated attendant at a convenient store, but Mati believes that he is intelligent. She is right to encourage him to begin remedial classes at college. He is a lot of fun and always comes up with wise bits. “Anybody can become violent if set up for it.” “Anyone can be angry if set up for it.” Mati used these bits in persuading him to get over his jail experience. “You have been set up to show anger at the police; forget it and take back your power,” she said to him.
The police officer takes her license and goes to check on it.
Her hands are still up when he comes back and tells her to open her pocket book.
“Where are you going to?”
“Wall Mart sir.”
“What are you going there for?”
This question comes as a surprise, but Mati does not raise her brows. She adjusts her smile to answer the question.
“Why are you laughing?”
She looks at him straight in the eyes, “Because I am happy.” Her smile in now genuine because she actually feels happy that he has not found anything on her.
“What money will you use at Wall Mart?”
“It’s not food stamp, sir. My own credit card.”
“You work?”
“I work in the kitchen at Wichita State University where I am a student.”
“You are a student as WSU?”
“Yes sir.”
He allows her to go.
'He may have a soft spot for the premiere university in Wichita,' her smile widens for belonging to WSU. The smile is still on her face as she drives off thinking that the encounter will make a good entry in her class journal. Her professor always praises her for her unusual collection of anecdotes that get the class to see another side of American life.
In another part of town, Katie Wendell stands in front of the mirror smiling at the tall blond beauty looking at her just like the image on the cover of Glamour magazine. She should have been a model, but the prospect of marrying Jeff Johnson and raising a lovely family, appeals more to her. She has made the arrangements for the wedding, in her head; talked to her favorite pastor, knows her wedding planner, the colors, bridesmaids and everything except that Jeff has not yet proposed. But it is coming soon in spite of “distractions from all those college girls that throw themselves at him.”
“Good thing is, he loves me,” so she is looking forward to his doing the right thing. She took the day off from her job at Victoria's Secret to buy stuff for making dinner for Jeff. She likes to show him what being married would be like – home cooked food and lots of fun with an all American girl. She smiles at the mirror.
On their way to Wall Mart, Jeff asks her how long the shopping would take.
“I just want to take my time. Cooking for you is an act of love and I like to take my time to select your favorite food items.”
“We can go to our favorite restaurant and I’ll let you pick the bill.”
“You know I like to do grocery shopping and cook just for us.”
“I’m meeting with my WSU discussion group to prepare-.”
“Always your discussion group.”
Jeff keeps quiet.
“It’s not even a class; just chatting with a bunch of women.”
More silence.
“OK. You can drop me off if that’s what you want.”
Jeff pushes the CD player button and selects the fourth track, Adele’s “One and only,” which is her favorite. She gets the message; no need to fight, but she is still not happy with him.
“Call me when you’re done,” Jeff says as he drops her off.
Mati has paid for her grocery and is on her way out when the woman in front of her suddenly stops.
“Excuse me ma’am?” Mati says.
The woman looks at her, gets her phone from her pocketbook and begins to use it.
'The white police officer can intimidate me but not this one, no.' Mati thinks as she pushes the woman’s cart out of the door and whispers in her ear. “Get out of my way, you ugly white woman.”
The woman is so infuriated by the insult that she lashes out, not in words but in a quick action. She hits the Wall Mart basket that Mati is carrying and Mati lets it fall. The contents spill out.
“Oh my God,” the Greeter cries. The machinist and shoppers are appalled. Mati is all smiles as she picks the sweet potatoes from the floor. An attendant comes forward to help her as another scolds the woman with the phone.
“Call the police!” Another says.
“Don’t bother to call the police. Maybe she’s just having a bad day,” Mati says with a glint in her large eyes.
A guard marches the woman out of the store with her cell phone beeping.
Outside the store, Mati sees the white woman crying beside the door. She passes near the woman and whispers again.
“I’ll whoop your ugly white ass.”
The woman screams at Mati. Mati does not yell back, but just shakes her head like she does not know what is wrong with the woman.
“Why is she yelling?” A little girl grabs her mother’s hand.
“She’s angry.”
Mati laughs all the more, enters her car and gives the woman an ugly sign.
The woman with the telephone is Katie Wendell, a normal white woman. She is known by her friends as a nice laid back young woman with an off and on relationship with Jeff Johnson. She is hooked on him and forgives his infidelities because she believes that he loves her, but is weak when women throw themselves at him. She likes his spunk personality and hopes that marriage will change things. Sitting outside Wall Mart waiting for Jeff, she reflects on the incident with the black woman. She was done with her shopping for boneless chicken breasts, red tomatoes and black olives when she remembered that she should have called Jeff to come for her. She was surprised when a black woman insisted on using the particular narrow walkway where she was standing. The black woman could have turned round and taken another way. No. This angry black woman had to show that she was the same as everybody.
“She pushed my cart and wanted to squeeze her fat ass through when I stopped her,” Katie says to Jeff recalling how she yelled at Mati.
“How dare you!’ I said and she just threw her basket and everything came tumbling out.”
“Are you sure Katie?”
“I can’t lie to you. Ok, maybe my hand touched the basket, but I swear, I didn’t push it or anything.”
“Did you apologize to her?”
“On whose side are you Jeff?”
“On our side.”
“I was not sorry because of the bad words that spilled out of her fat black mouth.” Katie becomes angrier as she remembers how people blamed her for hitting the basket and her frustration because the people did not understand the background of her action.
“I tried to explain what the black woman said to me, but nobody would listen to me. They were all feeling sorry for her and she was enjoying it.”
“You should have called the police,” Jeff says.
“The police would have been against me because people were already against me.”
“Then you would have told the police your own story.”
“You know how the police act these days; like they are afraid of black people because of all the shooting of black men and the Black-Lives-Matter and all that noise.”
“Were the potential witnesses white or black?”
“None of them was black! The attendant helping her pick her stuff from the floor is a white woman! Blue-eyed like me. Can you imagine that?”
Jeff thinks that the story will be a good one for his class journal, but he does not say it.
“I’m so mad.”
Jeff throws his hand on Katie’s shoulder.
“Just an angry black-.”
“No! Don’t say it.” Jeff pulls her closer.
“Let’s go out for dinner,” he says.
Katie does not move.
Mati Hooper is ready for dinner. She tells Jimal about her encounter with the police. He does not say anything. He picks at his food like he is suppressing some anger.
“What’s up Jimal? Talk to me. Say something.”
“What have we done?” he says quietly, almost in a whisper like he is talking to himself. Mati leans over the table close enough to hear him.
“Nothing, people just hate you for the way God made you. They don’t even know our stories. They don’t understand our struggles,” he says.
“We have to make them to understand?” she says leaning back on her chair. She narrates her encounter with “the white woman.”
“Did she understand that you set her up to be angry,” Jimal looks up. There is a glint in his eyes. Mati realizes that she has not helped the white woman to understand anything.
“Getting back with hate,” Jimal says. His voice is low; he is thinking about Mati’s story.
“It hasn’t solved the problem.” Mati loses her enthusiasm for the story.
“They need to sit in our seat even for one minute so that they will feel the heat, then-”
“Then what?” Mati interrupts him eagerly.
“They will know how it feels, then-“
“Then what?”
Mati says, “So much hate, so much violence and victimization.”
“Hate begets hate.”
“A lot of forgiveness is needed,” Mati says.
“A lot of forgiveness and pain have been going on one side. I wish that they will understand.” Jimal says. Mati thinks about her part in the encounter.
“Centuries of forgiveness; have they solved any problems?” Jimal says; his voice is still low.
“We’ll keep working on it and talking about it,” Mati looks at Jimal’s gloomy face.
Nobody is eating dinner.
Mirrors for Class Journal(Chinyere G. Okafor)
It is an unusual winter day in Wichita Kansas. The sun is intense like its summer time and many wear colorful tops. The only difference with today’s sun is that it often whacks you with chilly wind gusts. Mati Hoper bounces out of her Minnesota Street apartment in North East Wichita. She has a smile on her lips. She will cook dinner for Jimal Williams, her boyfriend, and she is going to Wall Mart to buy groceries. Jimal has just been released from Sedgwick County Jail. She frowns recalling the trial. The judge had raised his brows when the defense lawyer said that Jimal was at the “right place at the wrong time.” He was too early for work at QuickTrip in his neighborhood and was hanging out near the store. Police officers arrived and rounded up young men in the area; they said that there was a robbery. He was in jail for six months before the trial began. Even though they let him go, he felt that the system was unfair to him by keeping him in jail for that long “for doing nothing ‘cept being black.” Mati insisted that they needed to be positive and celebrate his homecoming; after all some of the others are still in police custody. She will buy sweet potatoes, green peas and corn flour for baking corn bread, which is his favorite. She cheers up.
Mati turns left into 17th Street and notices that a police car is behind her. She is driving within the speed limit of thirty five miles per hour. Anyway, she can’t afford to speed because the cracks and holes on the road slow you down. Her papers are correct and her car is in good condition, “cept the rear sounds like wind from stomach flu.” She believes that the police cannot arrest her for a noisy automobile. Yet she panics.
“I have done nothing wrong,” she assures herself and smiles, but the smile is suddenly wiped off her face as police car lights come on signaling that she should stop. She stops the car, raises her hands and fixes a broad smile on her face to show that she is happy with the police officer. Her mind goes to the police shooting of an unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown of Ferguson, in the neighboring State of Missouri. The young man was killed “just for doing nothing ‘cept being black.” Her heart begins to beat like that of a horse galloping a hill.
Mati usually shows all her teeth whenever she meets an authority figure as proof that she does not fit the profile of an angry black person. Her one year as a student at Wichita State University has given her the opportunity to perfect her grinning style. Majority of the professors and other authority figures are white. The university has also enabled her to take courses that sharpen her critical thinking about her situation as a full-bodied short black woman with big curly hair. Jimal likes her full breasts, butt, large bold eyes and bushy hair, but these characteristics are not included in the beauty usually portrayed in the media. She always tries to convince herself that media beauty is not the only beauty, as Jimal says. He may be an uneducated attendant at a convenient store, but Mati believes that he is intelligent. She is right to encourage him to begin remedial classes at college. He is a lot of fun and always comes up with wise bits. “Anybody can become violent if set up for it.” “Anyone can be angry if set up for it.” Mati used these bits in persuading him to get over his jail experience. “You have been set up to show anger at the police; forget it and take back your power,” she said to him.
The police officer takes her license and goes to check on it.
Her hands are still up when he comes back and tells her to open her pocket book.
“Where are you going to?”
“Wall Mart sir.”
“What are you going there for?”
This question comes as a surprise, but Mati does not raise her brows. She adjusts her smile to answer the question.
“Why are you laughing?”
She looks at him straight in the eyes, “Because I am happy.” Her smile in now genuine because she actually feels happy that he has not found anything on her.
“What money will you use at Wall Mart?”
“It’s not food stamp, sir. My own credit card.”
“You work?”
“I work in the kitchen at Wichita State University where I am a student.”
“You are a student as WSU?”
“Yes sir.”
He allows her to go.
'He may have a soft spot for the premiere university in Wichita,' her smile widens for belonging to WSU. The smile is still on her face as she drives off thinking that the encounter will make a good entry in her class journal. Her professor always praises her for her unusual collection of anecdotes that get the class to see another side of American life.
In another part of town, Katie Wendell stands in front of the mirror smiling at the tall blond beauty looking at her just like the image on the cover of Glamour magazine. She should have been a model, but the prospect of marrying Jeff Johnson and raising a lovely family, appeals more to her. She has made the arrangements for the wedding, in her head; talked to her favorite pastor, knows her wedding planner, the colors, bridesmaids and everything except that Jeff has not yet proposed. But it is coming soon in spite of “distractions from all those college girls that throw themselves at him.”
“Good thing is, he loves me,” so she is looking forward to his doing the right thing. She took the day off from her job at Victoria's Secret to buy stuff for making dinner for Jeff. She likes to show him what being married would be like – home cooked food and lots of fun with an all American girl. She smiles at the mirror.
On their way to Wall Mart, Jeff asks her how long the shopping would take.
“I just want to take my time. Cooking for you is an act of love and I like to take my time to select your favorite food items.”
“We can go to our favorite restaurant and I’ll let you pick the bill.”
“You know I like to do grocery shopping and cook just for us.”
“I’m meeting with my WSU discussion group to prepare-.”
“Always your discussion group.”
Jeff keeps quiet.
“It’s not even a class; just chatting with a bunch of women.”
More silence.
“OK. You can drop me off if that’s what you want.”
Jeff pushes the CD player button and selects the fourth track, Adele’s “One and only,” which is her favorite. She gets the message; no need to fight, but she is still not happy with him.
“Call me when you’re done,” Jeff says as he drops her off.
Mati has paid for her grocery and is on her way out when the woman in front of her suddenly stops.
“Excuse me ma’am?” Mati says.
The woman looks at her, gets her phone from her pocketbook and begins to use it.
'The white police officer can intimidate me but not this one, no.' Mati thinks as she pushes the woman’s cart out of the door and whispers in her ear. “Get out of my way, you ugly white woman.”
The woman is so infuriated by the insult that she lashes out, not in words but in a quick action. She hits the Wall Mart basket that Mati is carrying and Mati lets it fall. The contents spill out.
“Oh my God,” the Greeter cries. The machinist and shoppers are appalled. Mati is all smiles as she picks the sweet potatoes from the floor. An attendant comes forward to help her as another scolds the woman with the phone.
“Call the police!” Another says.
“Don’t bother to call the police. Maybe she’s just having a bad day,” Mati says with a glint in her large eyes.
A guard marches the woman out of the store with her cell phone beeping.
Outside the store, Mati sees the white woman crying beside the door. She passes near the woman and whispers again.
“I’ll whoop your ugly white ass.”
The woman screams at Mati. Mati does not yell back, but just shakes her head like she does not know what is wrong with the woman.
“Why is she yelling?” A little girl grabs her mother’s hand.
“She’s angry.”
Mati laughs all the more, enters her car and gives the woman an ugly sign.
The woman with the telephone is Katie Wendell, a normal white woman. She is known by her friends as a nice laid back young woman with an off and on relationship with Jeff Johnson. She is hooked on him and forgives his infidelities because she believes that he loves her, but is weak when women throw themselves at him. She likes his spunk personality and hopes that marriage will change things. Sitting outside Wall Mart waiting for Jeff, she reflects on the incident with the black woman. She was done with her shopping for boneless chicken breasts, red tomatoes and black olives when she remembered that she should have called Jeff to come for her. She was surprised when a black woman insisted on using the particular narrow walkway where she was standing. The black woman could have turned round and taken another way. No. This angry black woman had to show that she was the same as everybody.
“She pushed my cart and wanted to squeeze her fat ass through when I stopped her,” Katie says to Jeff recalling how she yelled at Mati.
“How dare you!’ I said and she just threw her basket and everything came tumbling out.”
“Are you sure Katie?”
“I can’t lie to you. Ok, maybe my hand touched the basket, but I swear, I didn’t push it or anything.”
“Did you apologize to her?”
“On whose side are you Jeff?”
“On our side.”
“I was not sorry because of the bad words that spilled out of her fat black mouth.” Katie becomes angrier as she remembers how people blamed her for hitting the basket and her frustration because the people did not understand the background of her action.
“I tried to explain what the black woman said to me, but nobody would listen to me. They were all feeling sorry for her and she was enjoying it.”
“You should have called the police,” Jeff says.
“The police would have been against me because people were already against me.”
“Then you would have told the police your own story.”
“You know how the police act these days; like they are afraid of black people because of all the shooting of black men and the Black-Lives-Matter and all that noise.”
“Were the potential witnesses white or black?”
“None of them was black! The attendant helping her pick her stuff from the floor is a white woman! Blue-eyed like me. Can you imagine that?”
Jeff thinks that the story will be a good one for his class journal, but he does not say it.
“I’m so mad.”
Jeff throws his hand on Katie’s shoulder.
“Just an angry black-.”
“No! Don’t say it.” Jeff pulls her closer.
“Let’s go out for dinner,” he says.
Katie does not move.
Mati Hooper is ready for dinner. She tells Jimal about her encounter with the police. He does not say anything. He picks at his food like he is suppressing some anger.
“What’s up Jimal? Talk to me. Say something.”
“What have we done?” he says quietly, almost in a whisper like he is talking to himself. Mati leans over the table close enough to hear him.
“Nothing, people just hate you for the way God made you. They don’t even know our stories. They don’t understand our struggles,” he says.
“We have to make them to understand?” she says leaning back on her chair. She narrates her encounter with “the white woman.”
“Did she understand that you set her up to be angry,” Jimal looks up. There is a glint in his eyes. Mati realizes that she has not helped the white woman to understand anything.
“Getting back with hate,” Jimal says. His voice is low; he is thinking about Mati’s story.
“It hasn’t solved the problem.” Mati loses her enthusiasm for the story.
“They need to sit in our seat even for one minute so that they will feel the heat, then-”
“Then what?” Mati interrupts him eagerly.
“They will know how it feels, then-“
“Then what?”
Mati says, “So much hate, so much violence and victimization.”
“Hate begets hate.”
“A lot of forgiveness is needed,” Mati says.
“A lot of forgiveness and pain have been going on one side. I wish that they will understand.” Jimal says. Mati thinks about her part in the encounter.
“Centuries of forgiveness; have they solved any problems?” Jimal says; his voice is still low.
“We’ll keep working on it and talking about it,” Mati looks at Jimal’s gloomy face.
Nobody is eating dinner.
- Share this story on
- 5
COMMENTS (1)