A Weird Experiece :: Personal Narratives Violence Crime Essays

A Weird Experience We were a threesome that late winter. Friday afternoons when doubting Thomas got home at a decent hour he called on the intercom and I went down the hall to their flat tire for drinks. Sometimes when he was late Krystal knocked on my door and asked me to come on down and observe her company. Later we might go go forth to dinner. Or we skipped dinner and merely talked and listened to music. Sometimes on Saturdays he took his car and we drove down the jersey shore or up the Hudson Valley or to Connecticut. Once we went out to The Hamptons whither they were looking for a vacation house. Our friendship lasted exactly three months. A lucky fig, Krystal said of the three of us. The perfect number. Thomas Milton was an investment banker. later on getting his Masters from Harvard Business School, hed returned to New York to a major tight and at 32 years old had already made $ one hundred million, or close to it. Thomas was tall, handsome, charmingand Jamaican. His beautiful photo case wife, Krystal, was Dominican and rich in her own right. The Miltons had just bought and were remodeling a penthouse in a nearby Central Park West apartment grammatical construction and would soon be moving from the cooperative. Inevitably we ended up public lecture virtually what I was calling in those days the great American dividerthe color line. Not that Thomas and Krystal initiated our discussions they said race didnt matter. No, it was I, the bloodless liberal for whom race does matter, who turned an everyday conversation into a complaisant study. I think they were embarrassed at my endless talk about such an immutable situationthey were black and basta, as Thomas in one case said soon after we met. And in general, he said, people ar racists. Thats just the way things are. Yet with severally racial affront encountered, with each new-sprung(prenominal) racist attack reported on TV, with each new case of police humiliation, I returned to the attack. Relentless, I forced them to participate. How long, I asked piously, this chasm betwixt whites and blacks? Why the fears? Why the silence? I often asked that winter wherefore race had to change our relationship? Change everything? And deprive me of what I above all neededtheir respect. One evening after a number of cocktails in the sprawling salon of their big 10th floor apartment I asked them point blank what it was like being black here in the city.