Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation

This short story is about a wealthy, widowed, white philanthropist who visits a Black church and protest rally to donate to the Save Our Lives campaign, a fictitious version of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The woman, Jessalyn, is uncomfortable from the beginning, sitting in the back of the church, listening to the speeches from countless Black people who have lost loved ones to police violence. She is moved by what she hears but does not know how to interact with the congregants or how to explain her presence. She recalls having locked her car doors when she exited the freeway to drive into the predominantly Black neighborhood. Several congregants turn to glare at her with suspicion and what she perceives as hostility.

The church’s preacher eventually approaches Jessalyn, who writes a check in donation to the movement. The minister asks a young Black man named Leader to walk Jessalyn back to her car, which he does with little conversation. At her car, Jessalyn wonders if she ought to give Leander a $20 tip, as if he’s a service worker. Her inner monologue asks, “But when is a tip not a tip? Is a tip always a tip? Is there no escaping—tip? If you are white?” There is no answer, and the story leaves Jessalyn in a state of confusion, plagued by her white guilt. 

This short story follows the lives of three interconnected non-white women, who, despite some of their similarities, remain divided by class. Iris and Gabriella are poor women who are domestic workers in suburban homes. Iris is employed as a childcare worker for a Jewish family, while Gabriella works in the home of a middle-class Jamaican woman named Mira. When the story opens, Mira is yet again confronted with the racism that surrounds her in the suburbs when another mother at the bus stop assumes she is a nanny. She resents her white friends and neighbors who say nothing: “You’re the one wearing whiteface after all. Fuck you, fuck off, fucking moron, and of those would do. I don’t need the potluck or the block party, just give one flying fuck. Say it loud and clear” (131).

Iris, alternatively, rises early in the morning, leaving her children to prepare for school on their own, so that she can cross town to care for someone else’s children. When her son gets in trouble at school because he is frequently late due to having to care for his younger siblings, Iris’s employer, Chana, treats her emergency as an annoyance and disruption to her more privileged life.

Iris’s fellow nanny, friend, and neighbor leaves her own children to care for Mira’s. Her eldest son, Luis, attends an elite prep school on scholarship, and she rarely sees him. Although his father works in the school, they do not speak. When Luis visits the home where she works, as a guest and friend of Mira’s son, he pretends he does not know her, ashamed of his background. Though each of the women in the story has faced racial or ethnic discrimination, class lines divide them.