Nite 9 Eric

Geez, mr. racist pig can’t get enough of me. I’m sitting quietly by myself at a table in the back where I usually sit away from the bustling crowd and as I’m lifting delicious boiled yams into my mouth, he stops at my table and makes some kind of comment about how long I’ve been here for.

I tell him I’m eating and have not desire to talk with him (I want to say to he makes me sick but I don’t) and I ask him to leave me alone.

This, apparently to him, is being uncivil because he protests that we might not agree but we can be civil to each other. He goes on to call me a girl – strike 1 for tonite – telling me he’s told his friends about this girl and her t-shirt and they offered to come put me straight. If only he knew…

I told him he’s a racist and I have no intention to be ‘civil’ to racists. He insists again he’s not a racist and I reiterate what he said to me.

Oh the things he said then, including it was Blacks who sold Africans into slavery and the Chinese are now enslaving more people in Africa than ever and he’s so informed and, “so much more than you ‘darling’” – strike 2 and he’s out – whites need to get restitution from Romans if I think Blacks need coddling by whites.

I told him fuck you several times as his already burnt face and bald head got redder and redder. It was such a slow burn and he had started out so sweetly condescending, I almost missed how angry he was getting and how his cadence was now laced with barefaced fury.

I told him he’s not only a racist but a misogynist pig and to leave me the fuck alone – which he did only because his girlfriend appeared to haul him off.

The waitress hurried over and asked me if I was okay. I just told her he was a bad man and she said she agreed. Apparently he’s been there many times.

But later when I left the cafeteria, another white man, Eric, approached me in the lobby and told me how happy he was to see my Black Womyn’s Lives Matter t-shirt. We talked for awhile in English and I found out he participated in BLM in Ohio, where he’s from & that he’s part of the crew that is filming some of the solar conference.

But the BEST thing is the film they are making is a follow-up to “The Power of Community” which I saw years ago at La Pena. It is the story of how Cuba survived the fall of the Soviet Union and transitioned from a country that depended on oil and pesticides while growing crops to sell to the world, to a country that became at least 80% organic and stopped growing sugar cane, etc., to export and instead began growing food to feed the people.

The filmmaker is HERE NOW! I’m so excited! And this film she’s making now will be a follow-up about where Cuba is at now, before the u.s. tourist invasion.

Before we part, Eric tells me to NEVER stop wearing my shirt – I assure him of course, I will NEVER stop wearing my shirt!