What do I call wanting support from someone based only on the fact that we have something in common? I don’t know. But I really wish we as women, and we as black women would stick together. We all know someone in someone else’s shoes. This is the story:
A service person came to my apartment to fix something. No big deal. Well by the time I got there, this thing was still not fixed. I called the office first thing the next morning, to ask her to send the guy back to the apartment. She kindly replies that she doesn’t have a spare key to my apartment, and that I would need to be at home.
I kind of give a dumb and blank stare into the phone because surely the service guy was just inside my place the day before so where is the key? She told me she didn’t know when he’d return and seemed very nonchalant about it.
While I expressed to her a need to urgently have someone change my locks she informed me that I would have to pay fifty dollars to have it done. Well that’s absurd. Why do I have to pay for it, and you let him leave with my key. He could have made fifty copies by now.
I was curious and almost anxious is asking the voice on the other line if she was black? (That’s just the kind of girl I am). I asked her if she lived alone, and her response was yes to both. I proceeded to tell her I couldn’t believe that I was having a conversation about safety with another single black woman. I asked her to try on one of my Nine West Heels for just a moment and consider how she would proceed had she found herself in the same predicament. Some random person had a key to her place. I was almost in tears, after the conversation (I’m that girl, as well) – because she started out really forceful and determined not to admit any wrong doing.
I was appalled that I’d wasted the better part of 30 minutes discussing not having to replace a lock for a key that her service person had been wondering around with all day and night. We have to do better as a people. Now if the color and sex were removed from this story, right is still right. But it made me all the more sadder that we had those things in common.
