I am waiting for my breakfast order to arrive and I hear the angelic soundtrack from the movie, “The Mission.” The music stirs my soul, always has stirred my soul. I take in my surroundings, the elegant restaurant at the Morrison Clark hotel. The dining room is ornate beyond compare. There is something profound as the music and setting come together to create an experience for me. I am carried away.
It occurred to me to write about a fascinating woman. Born blonde and poor and stigmatized as the child of a single mother, the woman had every reason to be demoralized and to view the world as an unforgiving place. Whispers of ancestral guilt derived from Nazi Germany and its treatment of Jews compounded her sense of alienation.
She vowed to rise up in the world, to make something of herself, to find herself one day conversing in an elegant place like the Morrison Clark hotel courtyard. And by God, she did it. She rose up in life and the world and the climb gave the adult woman self-confidence, the self-confidence my ancestor Daniel Brown must have felt as he climbed from being his owner’s property to the propertied class in his own right. The intuition came to me in a flash — the son of a white slave master and the daughter of Nazi Germany were kindred spirits separated by space and time.
My eggs benedict arrived.
I looked around me and saw all the dressings of comfort — the fireplace quaintly for show in warm D.C., the rich wood paneling that bespoke Old Money, the ancient maps on the wall dating back to the Age of Exploration, the woman with dark hair facing me. We never spoke to each other. We exchanged glances. She seemed introverted as she ate alone. She ate quickly as she checked her cell phone from time to time. Did she have a pending appointment? A job interview?
I rummaged around for a casual remark to strike up a conversation. I heard a slight foreign accent as she placed her order. Definitely not from Washington, D.C. Unaware of my curiosity, she checked her cell one last time and smiled at me. I looked away because I am an introvert. She left the room never to be seen again.
Some writers always label people by race. I never do unless race drives the story. I prefer my world where race recedes into the ether.