Short Story: The Front Room

Reluctantly, I sat in the back room, as I was told. The man who stood at the front of the restaurant was not a good man. He had been in one of my freshman college classes, but I doubt that he knew of or appreciated my existence.

 It had been an hour and I still had not been waited upon. The men in the front room had already eaten and paid, before the staff had so much as blinked at me.

Another man, of my own status, walked in and courageously sat in the front room without paying any mind to the host. I followed his example. I stood up and sat at the table with him. The staff now seemed to be paying some attention to me, even more than the other men in the front room.

The host had been at our table within the minute. “Yer lucky I even let you in here,” he said with his thick north Georgian accent,” Now yer takin’ advantage of my generosity.”

“shut up, you stupid hick”, the man at my table said,” you’ve got no idea…”, I grabbed his shoulder.

“Generosity?” I said. “Explain how you were being generous.”

He was speechless for a minute, “Y’all don’t have any business with these good, honest people, you’ll git Just as good service when we git time.”

The man at the table with me stood up, “What makes you so much better than us?”

“Ain’t it obvious?” the host said.

I sat up in my chair, “I dream of the day that men like you and men like us can look past these discernible differences and live together without conflict.”

The man opened his big mouth and laughed in my face, carelessly spewing spit. I became furious and decided to leave the establishment before I gave a worse name to our people. The man at the table with me followed. He was no longer the man that had first sat at that table.