In “My Name is Margaret” a story is told about a young African American servant named Margaret whose grandmother back in Stamps “had owned the only Negro general merchandise store since the turn of the century”. Margaret works very hard for a white woman, Mrs. Viola Cullinan, and along the duration of her time at Mrs. Cullinan’s meets another young servant by the name of Miss Glory. Mrs. Cullinan’s old lady friends one day explain to Mrs. Cullinan that she needs to change Margaret’s name to Mary because Margaret is too long of a name to say. Margaret overhears this and is angry, but of course cannot say anything about it. Until the end of the story, Miss Glory is the one who helps comfort Margaret about her new name change. There is a main emotion of anger from racism throughout this story in which I can connect with in this blog post. In my narrative scene below I will be writing about an incident I experienced at work, very similar to Margaret’s, that caused anger within myself as well.
It was another ordinary night at work and my shift felt normal just like it always has. My employees were working hard and my area was running smoothly as it always does on Friday nights. I was in a good mood from earlier in the day, and I had a decent sized smile on my face. Until about two hours into my shift when I received a piece of information that had really sent my night into an uproar. I was pulled aside by my boss and was told that a woman needed to speak to me for a few minutes. My boss stood quietly in the distance behind me while this woman spoke to me. I was already feeling intimidated by the suspense of not knowing what words were going to be spoken from this woman’s mouth and it didn’t help that she didn’t introduce herself either. Here I was a sitting duck just wondering who this mystery woman was. Mystery woman jumped right into the situation saying an employee of mine had filed a complaint with the Human Resources Department about me being discriminative. She told me the complaint had been filed after this employee noticed I was sending a certain employee home early due to her skin color being white, and then preceded to ask me if I believed this was true. My palms were a clammy kind of sweaty and my face felt very warm. I could feel my heart start beating slowly and steadily, but then quickly picking up pace to a very hard pounding sensation deep in my chest cavity. In this moment I could tell from feeling these specific changes in my body that I was completely enraged, not at mystery woman for breaking the news to me, but at my employee for filing this complaint in the first place. I had stepped back for a moment and all you could see was my chest puffed out like the Big Bad Wolf’s, because I needed to take a deep breath momentarily to calm down so I didn’t respond in the wrong way from being angry. My heart returned to its normally paced beat after that deep breath and I was then able to calmly respond back to the mystery woman, “No ma’am I do not believe this to be true”. Mystery woman then thanked both me and my boss for our time and walked her way out into the distance. I then took another deep breath and wiped the stress provoked sweat beads from my forehead and watched them fly to the floor. I also was able to lick the salty sweat beads from my upper lip in the most intense relief I ever felt that this moment was finished. My boss before returning back to her normal responsibilities noticed the distressed look on my face and asked if I was alright after the whole conversation. I had chuckled in disbelief that all this had just happened and replied to her saying that I was a little shaken up, but alright, and just glad that experience was finally over.
2 Comments
Sabatino
2/4/2019 11:01:28 am
Thanks for sharing such a personal moment from you life story.
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Daniel Weaver-Cooke
2/4/2019 01:32:41 pm
I really appreciated the amount of description you used. I felt as if I was the one who was confronted by some random woman and accused of something as serious as that.
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Martina ZuppoThis page will be used for me to express my thoughts through writing expressively to a collection of blog posts. Archives
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