The Saddest Thing I've Ever Heard

Dunkin Donuts on 36th and 8th avenue. Saturday, 10 am.

Managed by people from India and/or Southeast Asia.

Not crowded.

I buy a bottle of water, sit down to read. I'm hardly a customer.

A black man sits down at a table one row behind me. My back is two him, but I hear him rummaging through his carpetbag.

One brown Dunkin Donuts worker walks over. "You have to leave now. You've been sitting here, and now you have to leave."

"Man, I'm looking for something in my bag." Hisses as he says it. This man is not overtly homeless, not even ambiguously so, but he hasn't bought anything in the store. I saw him come in and sit down while I was standing in line with my $1.50 Aquafina.

The DD worker walks away. The man behind me says, "Fuck you. Imma fuckin' kill you" loud enough for me to hear, but the worker doesn't. He is unaffected, perhaps a survival strategy. A few seconds later, the manager ambles over, his hands clasped behind his back, relaxed.

"My friend, you cannot sit here now. You have to leave." Yellow, orange, brown shirt tucked into his high-waisted khaki pants, walks by me, is now in my peripheral view.

"Why you sayin' that!" Hands -- fists -- bang onto the dark pink table.

"Because you are not a customer. This seating is for customers."

"Customer! What the fuck do you think I am? I am a fucking customer!"

"Sir, you need to buy something here to be a customer at this Dunkin Donuts."

My eyes bore holes in the rear wall. And then he says it. He goes there.

"I've been a customer at Dunkin Donuts longer than you and your damn family have been in this country."

And then I start crying and do not turn around.

The manager walks back to his counter, eyes turned downward, and tends to his customers who are urgent and worried and unsympathetic as they order their coffees and breakfast sandwiches.

I'll never forget this. For me, that statement says (almost) everything about race politics in America today. We are not post-race. There is considerable work to do.