Two days later they was sitting eating their baguettes together and she asked him a question. It was the first question she'd asked him about him.
"You like being black?"
"Don't know. I ain't never been black."
He was quick to answer so she knew he'd already thought about it a lot.
"No?"
"No."
"Then what color you being now?"
"Burnt sienna."
"You what?"
"I'm burnt sienna." She stared across at him.
"And who in hell's name told you you're burnt …"
"Sienna. Ain't nobody told me. I looked it up."
"You looked up your color? Where the …rather can you do a thing like that?"
"At the hardware store."
"You're messing with my brain now, fat man."
"No ma'm, Saifon." She liked how that name sounded coming out of some other mouth. "At the hardware store they got color charts for paint. You can see what color you really are. I'm too light for dark chocolate and too dark for coffee. But you stand me in front of a field of old siennas that got 'emselves burnt down, and I'd be invisible."
"Why would you go to all the trouble of looking up something like that?"
"I just wanted to know."
"Why?"
"How come you never ask me this many questions about pool balls?"
"Why?"
He rehearsed his answer to himself before he spoke.
"Well, there's people call me black, right? But it ain't really talking about color. It's a word they use to describe my race. Except, black got a lot of other meanings too, like dirty, like sinister, you know? Them civil rights brothers stand up and tell us we gotta be proud of being black. But I ain't black so why should I be proud of being it?"
"You sooner be proud of being burnt sarsaparilla?"
"No. Well, yeah, kinda. It ain't easy to explain. I just wanna put 'em straight you know? I got this perfect world planned out. First we get to be proud of being black, and the people who ain't quite black enough say, 'hey, what am I gonna be proud of?' So they break away and make a brown group. But in that brown group you got all different browns, you know? So they all break away and make a coffee group and a burnt sienna group. But the burnt sienna group got frizzy hair or they got straight hair."
Saifon knew there had to be a point somewhere at the end of all this. She waited patiently, chewing on her sweet corn and beet baguette.
"So, where do we get to? The 'being proud' groups keep dividing and splitting cause they realize they got differences. And at the very end, we got millions of groups with one person in 'em. And each of them one-person groups is real proud of themselves. But it ain't cause of their 'sameness' no more, they're proud cause they're different, they're unique.
"Can you imagine how difficult it'd be to hate people on account of their one-person group? Can you hear 'em? 'I can't stand you dark pink, bald, green-eyed, long-legged, nine-toed, bad-breathed, small-butt people.' Think how exhausting that would be."
"Wow."
"It's like if they call you, excuse me, if they call you yella, you can put 'em straight and tell 'em what you really are."
"What am I?"
"Well, hell I don’t know. You have to go and look it up at the hardware store."
She looked up at the greasy windows, but she could still see the light.
"You know Waldo, I'm gonna rather well do just that. Being called black don’t seem too bad to me, but yella, man I hate that. They say yella through their teeth like it's something you catch. Ain't nothing yella about me."
"All right."
"What time is it?"
"Ten of one."
"Should just be opening when I get there."
"Where you going?"
"Hardware store."
"We start work in ten minutes."
"Rather you, Mr. Trainer. Old Desire says to me, 'Do everything Waldo here tells you to.' And Waldo just told me to go to the hardware store to look up my color. So here I go." She stood up, dusted the breadcrumbs off her front, and headed out to her truck.
"Wait I …didn't mean n …''