1913issue6online

84 during slow periods in the day. Meanwhile, on my walks home, Paul Simon sang of the kind of neighborhood I imagined she returned to at night, conjuring for me a picture of her home life that must have been about as accurate as the set of Sesame Street: “Oh-woh-oh/ Carlos and Yolanda/ Dancing in the Hall- way/ To an old melody/ Spanish eyes and soft brown curls.” We looked quite similar and couldn’t have been more different, and this fascinated me. There wasn’t much to do at the cafe. A nice guy with a long braid down his back named Anthony checked in on us peri- odically, but there wasn’t much to fail at. We met our duties without much effort, and the customers were happy. I felt self conscious about my background there, as most of my coworkers were single mothers who lived in Washington Heights, while I was a single student living alone with hardly any responsibili- ties beyond feeding myself. I asked them question after ques- tion about their children and their boyfriends, and began to feel mild disdain for the people who worked on the floor of the bookstore, wearing their English degrees like capes when they came to ask for discounted coffees without making an effort to learn our names. My own English degree stayed easily hidden behind my skin, and I liked it there. I never made an attempt to strike up conversation with the booksellers out of irritation with the smug way they cascaded through their position in the store’s hierarchy without seeming to question it. So long as I didn’t open my mouth to reveal my private schooled, California tongue, I was able to blend in with the tonal range of brown skins behind the counter. Only my immediate coworkers were privy to the fact that I was, most certainly, an alien in their midst. Ø Born in New York City in 1948, Adrian Piper became the first tenured African American woman in the field of philosophy. She is also a conceptual artist. While in graduate school, she began to read the philosophical writings of Immanuel Kant. Passages from Critique of Pure Reason so riveted her that she needed to take breaks from reading it to go look at herself in the mirror to make sure she still existed. Ø

1913issue6online

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