I took the bus back from Richmond to DC early Sunday morning. I love contrasts, so after driving John’s Mini Cooper S all over West Virginia, getting on a budget bus with a Chinese driver and full of folks dropped off by a collection of barely running vehicles, or who’d sprinted across the industrial landscape to the bus’s 7-11 launching point provided the perfect counterpoint to end my trip with.
The seats filled up bit by bit, each of use staking out our row with bags and purses and coats. Whatever we could use to signal that this isn’t the seat you were looking for. Move along. Move along.
At least until the seats started to fill up seriously. Across the way, the pretty girl was already settling to sleep…or at least play possum until everyone had a dance partner for the ride. A white Buick pulled up at the last moment and Winston got out, though I didn’t know it at the time.
When he paused at my empty seat I waved him in. “More than welcome,” I told him. He sat down and flashed a bright white smile.
“Wintson,” he said over a firm handshake. “Ernest…I like your hat.” I said, taking in his new fedora topping a blazer and vest with a comfortably worn look to them, and his chocolate brown slacks, duller in contrast to the rich brown of his hands resting in his lap. He thanked me and I turned back to watching us pull away from the parking lot and listening to bluesy standards through my ear-buds.
I was thinking about how my socioeconomic status separated me from the people around me, a pretty even mix of black and white, with possibly a few Asians and Hispanics thrown in. In age we ranged from five or six to somewhere around ninety judging from the look of the Asian woman who sat down in the front row. We drove through what looked to have been a bustling industrial section once, now more mixed by conversion to other uses, but still gritty, and empty early on a Sunday morning.
Winston drifted off beside me.
About half an hour up ninety-five I saw that he was awake, and I asked him what DC held for him.
“Not goin’ to DC…heading up to New York City.”
New York. My home away from home. So I asked what he was heading up for.
“I’m a teacher. I teach math at a school and evenings at a college.”
Winston came to the US from Jamaica when he was three. He grew up in NYC, got his teaching degree and made good. Married another teacher (she’s an assistant teacher) there, but the pace of New York living wasn’t for her so they moved down to Virginia which she’d had her eye on all along. Moving to Virginia meant taking a major pay cut from his New York teacher’s salary, so he wound up teaching at two community colleges to make ends meet.
After a few years of that Winston told his wife either she need to go to work full time, or he needed to take a job teaching somewhere that paid better.
Now he gets on the bus every week and heads up to NYC to teach.
Winston and I had a wide ranging conversation, talking about education, driving while black, the military industrial complex, Nikola Tesla, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and the Illuminati, the collusion of White and Black power structures to create a new form of slavery, not just for Blacks but for the economically disadvantaged, the history books he’s read recently, and the merits of the Mercedes E-Class…of which Winston has two. He’s down to two houses, by the way, as he had to let the rental property he owned in Pennsylvania go.
Go ahead. Judge a book by its cover.
Just don’t forget to open it up and read the words too.