University of Georgia

Terry College of Business
 
 

CHAPTER NINE
 

"So, what do you think?" My editor, a Caucasian woman, thrusts an advance copy of the premier issue of the magazine toward me. The coverline reads "Murder, Drugs, and the Rap Star." The cover photograph is the face of a young black man, printed in dark browns and grays, fading first into shadow, then into black. The man looks threatening, furtive, hostile, and guilty: Richard Wright's fictional Bigger Thomas, who chopped up a white girl and stuffed her in the furnace, made real and transposed to the 1980s. The ultimate nightmare Negro.

"So, what do you think?" she asks again.

What I want to say is, "I think this looks horrible. It plays into white folks' stereotypes of young black men as inherently dangerous and rap music as fomenting racist insurrection. Plus, the photograph is ugly, it's too dark and evil looking. Is this really going to be the first issue of the magazine black folks in this city have so eagerly awaited? This is not going to get over. Why not use Harrington's piece on George Bush or mine on Oprah Winfrey? Anything but this."

Of course, I don't say that. We are standing in the middle of our section of the newsroom. Is it my imagination, or has the clack of terminals and the wheedling of sources over the telephone suddenly quieted all around me? Am I paranoid, or are my colleagues really straining to hear my response? I choose my words carefully. I don't want to sound the way the brother on the cover looks: hostile, alienated, potentially dangerous.

"I don't love it," I say. I am both diplomat and chickenshit.

"Neither do I. But Don Graham does, Bradlee does, and Jay does. And John Ed is Bradlee's favorite writer." Why? This I never get quite straight, but I hear several variations of one basic story: Ben Bradlee first saw John Ed Bradley kicking butt on the football field at some college in Louisiana, then subsequently discovered Bradley could write; in this Bradlee saw himself as he was--or wanted to be--forty years earlier, and thus brought John Ed to the Post.

"What don't you like about it?" I ask.

"I think the story's good, but not for the first issue. I've lived here for a long time and Washington is a black city. I think black people here will be offended by this. I don't think Jay understands that."

"I think you're right. Have you talked to him?"

"I've tried, but it's too late now," she says, "It's printed." She shrugs, dismissing the topic.

Easy for her. She may be a feminist-progressive type who's dated black men, but she ain't black. She can go to beaucoup anti-apartheid rallies, but she'll never be a race woman, never understand what it is to be compulsively, irrevocably, painfully responsible not only for herself, but for her race. By virtue of my skin color, I'm going to take the weight for this if the shit hits the fan. Blacks folks are going to look at me and ask, "Why didn't you do something?"

For my editor, however, the subject is closed. She launches into a critique of my Oprah Winfrey story, recently transformed by Lovinger into a story about Oprah's father. This decision I consider weird, misogynistic, and dumb, but I'm trying to be a team player. I've been working on the story for so long I've damn near got it memorized. A good thing, too, because what I'm thinking about now isn't fat, happy, rich Oprah Winfrey, but the furtive-looking young brother on the cover. It's making my stomach hurt.

I've only lived in Washington a few months, but it's clear that the black folks here take themselves extremely seriously. With the largest black middle-class population of any city in the country, they not only have a strong--and sometimes distorted--sense of their own importance, but the numbers to make a lot of noise.

After I'd been in D.C. four years, I have lunch with Ivanhoe Donaldson, a very smart black man who was a deputy mayor under Marion Barry (until he was stupid enough to get caught stealing $190,000 in city funds and was sent to jail). He summed up the power of black Washingtonians thus: "We're like the people of South Africa. We come off the bantustans every day to work. Even though we don't own much of anything and are economically powerless, if we all took the same day off the city would be crippled, could not function. That's the power of black Washington. We don't own anything but we keep things running."

In the beginning, I didn't know any of this. What I had was a job, a house that cost me $1,200 a month, and, after I saw the first issue, a feeling of foreboding in my stomach. As soon as I finish talking to my editor, I read first the cover story and then a column by Richard Cohen sympathetic to a business owner's refusal to buzz young black men into his store. The stories are sandwiched in between shiny color ads exclusively featuring white folks. I call my friend Thulani in New York for a reality check.

"Hey, Thulani, what's happening?"

"Doreena. I'm glad to hear from you," she drawls. Ever since we read an article by Alice Walker in which she moaned about intra-racial color discrimination in the name of a persecuted dark-skinned woman she called Doreena, we have cynically/affectionately called each other that.

"How's everything going?"

"I don't know, but I think it's about to get weird."

"Well, we knew that."

"Yeah, Doreena, but weirder than even we suspected."

"Now that's weird. What's going on?"

I hunch over and wrap my lips around the telephone--slander mode--and begin talking. I speak sotto voce because I sit in a wide-open space, flanked on every side by desks, telephones, computer terminals, colleagues.

"The cover is this hideous picture of a dangerous-looking Negro, complete with animal-like flared nostrils."

"Ummm. The Negroes in Washington are not going to be pleased," Thulani says. Even though she's been gone from her hometown of Hampton, Virginia, for twenty years, Thulani remains a daughter of the south. She still drawls, tells intricate, slightly gothic tales about family, and understands the mentality of the southern black, something that 1, a stone child of the north, do not.

"I think there's going to be a problem." She can also be the queen of understatement.

"So do I. I wish you had come to work here, too."

"That was one of my smarter decisions." Thulani, a writer and editor at the Village Voice, was offered a job the same time I was, without an interview, sight unseen. We both figured it was because the magazine needed a black editor.

"My stomach hurts," I moan.

"Mine's starting to. But before I get sick, what's the story like?"

"Unbelievably horrible. It's like a pseudo-anthropological "Let's-gointo-de-ghetto-and-see-how-the-sociopaths-live" story. I mean, the kid hasn't even gone to trial yet and when you finish reading it you feel like, screw the trial, send him straight to the gas chamber."

"That bad, huh?"

"Worse. It's full of horrid, sepia-tone photographs, one of which is the rapper lying in bed as his girlfriend cuts his toenails. We're talking maximum stereotype overdrive here. After all the build-up, the newspaper and magazine ads promoting this great new magazine, this shit is unbelievable, I mean--" I am talking so fast I run out of breath and have to pause to gulp for air.

"I hate to sound like an editor and interrupt your ranting, but what's good about it, Doreena?" Thulani says.

The word "ranting" reminds me of how we became friends. Thulani was my editor at the Voice. Initially, we greeted each other with suspicion. Middle-class black folks, especially those with straight or pseudo-straight hair who are nearer light-skinned than dark, tend to grow up feeling we have something to prove--not just to white folks but to just about everyone, including each other. We greet one another with skepticism, treating each other as potential Eurocentric sell-outs (or, as the Black Panthers used to say, bourgeois running-dog lackey traitors to the race) until proven otherwise. We scrutinize each other for signs that we are trading on our color or class to get over. We examine each other's attitudes about race and self through our own internal microscopes of fear and selfdoubt, looking for indications that we have allowed our educational and material success to distance us from "the people." Discovering this, we distance ourselves from each other.

With me and Thulani, this racial scrutiny made us friends. Peering at each other, we found, was more often than not like looking in a mirror. From similar families, with similar histories, both of us were writers, political progressives, and race women, "stone to the bone," as James Brown would say. We became friends because we discovered we could relax the racial vigilance, discard the "correct" position, with each other. When we were together, our search for the authentic Negro experience was over: we were it. We'd talk about whoever we felt like dissing, get petty, whisper secrets, rant and laugh uproariously at confidences that to other ears would be seditious.

Surely we would become greater pariahs than we already are if a tap had been put on our telephone lines as we discussed Thulani's hotel room interview with presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, who was garbed in sweat pants, a shrinking T-shirt, and what she described as "a big fat stomach and a navel as big as a tire." Or my telling T. about a magazine party, complete with a D.J. and mirrored disco ball, at which managing editor Len Downie commented to me, "We've never had this before. I guess it's for you."

Not infrequently, I have picked up the telephone to hear Thulani's voice, midsentence, and understood immediately what she was talking about. It is the same with her. We are united by our similarities of experience and response. We speak the same language. For us, ranting is a way of communicating, shorthand for all that we are, were told we should be, aspire to become.

"Hell-oooo?" Her voice yanks me back to the present.

"Nothing."

"There must be something."

"I'm serious. Nothing. The whole thing is horrible. The pictures, the reporting, the writing."

"What do the editors there say?"

"Most of them love it. Those that don't realize it's impolitic to say anything negative."

"What about the writers?"

"No one cares what we think. They assume we all have sour grapes because our stories aren't in the premier issue."

"That's typical. Well, FedEx me the story. I'll read it and call you tomorrow. When does it come out?"

"Sunday."

"What are your plans?"

"I'm going to stay home in bed and reread Song of Solomon."

Thulani laughs. "Good strategy. Can I make a suggestion?"

"Sure. I wish you would."

"Take your phone off the hook." We both laugh.

"I've gotta go. I'm editing a story by a writer who can't craft a clear sentence."

"All right. Call me tomorrow, as soon as you've read it.

"I will. Relax. You got out of New York and got the money you wanted, didn't you? That was your priority. Remember, you're not running things."

"Yeah, you're right,' I sigh.

"I'll call you tomorrow.'

"Hey, Doreena, I just thought of something good about the story.

"Yes?"

"I didn't write it."
 

CHAPTER TEN
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

My phone starts ringing Saturday evening, a few hours after the homedelivery subscribers receive their "throwaways": circulars, coupons, and cartoons. As it turns out, the magazine is soon to become the greatest throwaway of them all.

"Jillie. What is this piece of shit?"

"Hey, Nicky, what's happening?;' I recognize the voice of Lillian Nixon Rickman, a forty-year friend of my parents. She and her children, childhood friends rediscovered, have been mainstays of my move to D.C.

"I was calling to ask you that. I just finished reading this damn magazine. What a disappointment after all that build-up. And that article--"

"About the rapper?" I interrupt.

"That ugly boy on the cover? That didn't bother me nearly as much as Richard Cohen's column saying it's okay to lock shop doors and not buzz in black males."

"Oh yeah. I was trying to forget about that."

"What happened to him? He used to be a liberal."

Black folks say this a lot. I can remember being a kid, Iying in bed, enveloped in the smell of scotch and the sound of ice tinkling against glass, listening to my parents and their friends talk about "the race." Almost always, the conversation turned to some elected official, corporate magnate, journalist, or entertainer who was less than supportive of the notion of civil rights. Almost invariably someone would ask, "Didn't he used to be a liberal?"

"Did he? When?" In the few months I've been at the Post, the liberals in print have been few and far between. Cohen isn't one of them.

"These bourgeois black folks are going to be hot about this magazine. You should count your blessings you're not in it--" I hear a click signaling another call coming in.

"Go ahead and get that, I'll talk to you later," Nicky says. I switch over.

"Hello?"

"What a piece of garbage," Lorrie, Nicky's daughter tells me.

"I know."

"Did they really spend millions of dollars on this?" She laughs.

"Yeah."

"Those are some simple-minded hoggies."

"Uh hun," Lorrie's laughing, but it's hard for me to enjoy the humor in the situation.

"Jullie? Are you all right?"

"Okay. Apprehensive."

"Don't worry about it. You're new in town. Not that many people know you work there."

"That's a comforting thought." And it is, at least until I remember the picture taken a few weeks earlier of the magazine staff in front of the Jefferson Memorial, which is scheduled to run in the third issue. I sit front t row center, grinning like a latter-day Sally Hemings, Jefferson's black mistress. Oh yassuh, boss, I'm just a happy darkie. Oh God.

And so it goes most of Saturday night. Everyone who calls me is black. No one has anything positive to say. In their outrage, paranoia reigns. Just about everyone sees the publication of the Cohen and Bradley articles in the first issue as a diabolical, premeditated, racist attack on D.C.'s black community by the Washington Post. The consensus is that the newspaper commissioned and printed the two articles--both of which portray black youth (and by extension, some argue, the black community) as criminal--as an intentional and organized slap in the face.

It does not occur to them that the institution that is the Washington Post seldom devotes much thought to black people at all, and that the editors and managers aren't diabolical. They just screwed up.

Warning bells about management's inattention to procedure and lack of foresight should have gone off when, two weeks after I started work, I got a call from New York sportswriter Robert Lipsyte. "Jill, you're already working at the Post, aren't you?" he asked. "Yeah, sure, why?" I responded. "Because someone just called me to check your reference," he said. We both laughed. But as time goes on, I realize it really wasn't funny, but symptomatic of a larger problem.

By eleven Saturday night, I'm stressed to the max, exhausted, and have what feels like a permanent knot in my stomach. I turn the ringer off the telephone. Even so, I can feel the weight starting to come down on me. Several Stolis straight-up don't make me feel any lighter. They do knock me out, though.

My inclination Sunday is to leave the phone off the hook, get back into bed with a pint of Haagen-Dazs ice cream covered with sliced bananas and chocolate syrup, and read something with no redeeming intellectual value. But I am constitutionally unable to do so. My upbringing as a good race woman, an eternal striver for number one-dom, coupled with my instincts as a reporter, won't allow it. I answer the telephone and bear witness to the irate ravings of assorted members of Washington's black middle-class. I do not say much.

That Monday I go to work hoping that my own perceptions, and those of my callers, are wrong--that the magazine isn't as heavy-handed as it appears, that I'll see those blue skies that brought me here to Washington and the Post in the first place. When I get to the office, I find the air thick, voices thin, faces stricken. The telephones ring relentlessly, a massive complaint line for our readers.

I find a note on my desk from Warren Brown, a black business reporter who covers the auto industry. It read, "Jill: Let's See! Loads of Ain't-we-rich-white-'n'-happy advertisements in the 'Maagggazine,' with nary a brown or black face in 'em. And, ah, two stories on the folk, both negative. Are they kidding?"

Initially, we all underestimate black D.C.'s ire. In spite of the incessantly ringing telephones and the grumblings of other staff members, we at the magazine hope that the anger about the first issue will blow over as the week wears on. It doesn't. The premier issue quickly becomes grist for the local radio talk shows, driven by station WOL's owner and morning talk queen, Cathy Hughes. A coalition of forty-seven community organizations, including the Washington Urban League and the Archdiocese of Washington, forms the Washington Post Magazine Recall Committee, led by Hughes. The coalition demands that the Post suspend publication of the magazine and initiate talks about what the coalition sees as ongoing negative depictions of the black community in the newspaper. Once it becomes organized and articulated, the anger of the black community becomes news. Local television and print media soon get on the bandwagon, and the national media picks up the story.

Is it my imagination, or does Lovinger slink and scurry around the office more than usual? Me, I walk around with a stomachache, my standard physiological alert to mounting disaster.

When Lovinger isn't in meetings or at home passing kidney stones, he calls us together to tell us that he stands by the story and is confident the brouhaha will soon blow over. John Ed Bradley lounges around the office with red eyes, looking persecuted. My colleagues pat him on the back, squeeze his arm, make jokes, offer sympathy, as if somehow it is the black community that has done him wrong--conveniently ignoring management's phenomenal fuck-up. I envy their arrogance, their inherent belief in the efficacy of whatever they're doing, the smugness that comes from years of simply being Caucasian and, for the really fortunate, having a penis.

From a distance, it's easy to start thinking that white folks run things because they're especially intelligent and hardworking. This, of course, is the image of themselves they like to project. Up close, most white folks, like most people, are mediocre. They've just rigged the system to privilege themselves and disadvantage everyone else.

For the average white male newspaperman, those worlds beyond the narrow one he inhabits exist primarily as paths to career development. When it comes to black folks, we exist mostly as potential sociological, pathological, or scatological slices of life waiting to be chewed, digested, and excreted into the requisite number of column inches in the paper.

Knowing this, I should not be amazed by the shock and surprise with which my colleagues greet the public's almost universal loathing of the million-dollar magazine. Still, they must have been willfully ignorant when it came to considering place and context; I mean, didn't they realize that in addition to being the nation's capital, this is a principally black city?

It's not that surprising that it failed to occur to Don Graham, the boy publisher. He may have spent a few years as a cop, worked in the pressroom, and paid lip service to the Post's commitment to "the local community," but he's still a rich kid waiting for his mother to let go of the reins. But where was Ben "Watergate" Bradlee? His heir apparent, managing editor Len Downie? Magazine editor Jay Lovinger? Didn't it occur to any of these male masters of journalism that in Chocolate City a magazine premier focusing on Negroes with criminal intentions wouldn't do it?

For that matter, where was Milton Coleman, assistant managing editor for Metro, the spook gatekeeper at the Post? Shouldn't he have picked up on the message the magazine was sending? So much for fail-safe.

In South Africa a hundred years ago, the Voortrekkers called it the "white lager." That's when they pulled their wagons in a circle, hunkered down, and prepared to defend themselves against the encroaching African hordes who had the audacity to fight for their land.

At the Washington Post magazine, the Caucasians didn't call it anything, but as far as I was concerned, it was the white lager circa 1986. There I was, an African-American woman, caught in the middle of a bunch of circling white wagons.

With each passing day, the response to the magazine got uglier, broader, more organized. What had started as a few people's rumblings soon became an organized roar of outrage. There were meetings in people's homes, churches, and community organizations. In restaurants, grocery stores, or standing in lines, someone was sure to be talking about the magazine. Get in a cab and that's what the cabbies were talking about. Cathy Hughes discussed the issue on her radio show five mornings a week. Someone even produced a recording called "Take It Back" that got some air play.

Overnight, those of us on staff were transformed from prophets into pariahs. Now when the managers came around it was for grim, huddled conferences in the editor's office. Gone were the encouraging words, slaps on the back, confident grins. In their place came stricken, disbelieving glances, that furtive movement of the eyes that comes when people are looking for somewhere to lay blame. I try to stay out of their line of vision. But it's not as easy to avoid my colleagues, many of whom walk around looking angry, traumatized, and like they're about to burst into tears.

Outside the office, I learn not to tell anyone where I work. When asked the most frequently asked question in Washington, "What do you do?" I respond simply, "I'm a writer." Somehow, "writer" connotes failure, someone sitting at home pounding away at a novel that will never be published. The curious are not only satisfied, but bored.

When I say I work for the Washington Post I am usually attacked. In D.C. everyone has a bone to pick with the newspaper. No matter that I am powerless and unpublished. Work for the Post and you open yourself up for a wide-ranging critique of that day's product.

The debut fiasco simply acts as a magnet, a focal point for what had previously been individualized little gripes. Thanks to our first issue, the disparate annoyances of thousands have coalesced into a single being of its own, a big fat monster named collective discontent. Cathy Hughes, Ron Walters, D.C. Congressional delegate Walter Fauntroy, and others organize an ongoing Sunday afternoon demonstration in front of the Post building. Citizens are urged to buy the magazine, come downtown, and throw it back on the steps of the building. Hundreds come. Quiet as it's kept, most folks weren't thinking about the magazine or the Washington Post until they heard about the magazine on the radio or television and were reminded to be insulted.

It's not just one group of black folks who are disgruntled, but lots of sets and subsets. The "native Washingtonian" Negroes would rather read about their glorious past--say, Walter Washington or Dr. Charles Drew--than their marginalized and increasingly irrelevant future. The buppies resent the aspersions that this one written-up black felon casts on their successful, assimilated, upwardly mobile lives.

And it's not even just black folks, the perennially disgruntled, who don't like the magazine, it's just about everyone in the city. Yuppies think the first issue is glum, depressing, and not upscale enough. Government types and powerbrokers wonder why so much space was wasted on some black criminal. Old-money types are looking for light amusement or abstraction. Advertisers are afraid they'll be stigmatized or boycotted for advertising in the magazine.

I sit tight, trying to be cool and not panic as I see my new life of money, middle-class bliss, and fence-straddling begin to fade away. Inside, I watch the wagons pull into a defensive circle. Outside, I hear the drums speak insult and revenge. I try to ignore them both.

"It's all a bunch of bullshit. It was a good article," says Peter Carlson, one of the other staff writers. Carlson is one of those "I'm proud to be a white male with good old American values, even if I am a member of an effete, liberal profession" type of white boys.

"Why do you say that?" I respond.

"Look at all the crap."

"What crap? Like peacefully demonstrating?"

"Those people are ridiculous."

"Why?"

"They're just too sensitive."

"Because black people don't like an article, that makes them too sensitive and ridiculous?"

"They didn't even read it. I bet half of those idiots who have nothing better to do than demonstrate against a magazine didn't read it."

"What makes you say that?"

"Because of their reaction. They didn't read it, they don't understand it, they're overly sensitive."

"Who's they?" I ask.

"Those people." He waves his hand dismissively toward the window

"Who's they? I mean, you're so busy talking about 'they' this and 'they' that, who's they?"

I feel myself toppling left, off the fence.

"You have a lot of nerve standing around talking about they this and

"I'm sick of all their whining. If they don't like the magazine, they shouldn't read it."

"Maybe 'they' want to like it."

"Oh. So if they don't like it, it's our fault?"

"Who else's fault is it? Theirs?"

"Don't they have anything better to do than demonstrate? Don't they work?

"What about free speech?"

"What about freedom of the press? I wish I was some damn minority who could blame race for all my problems," he snarls.

"How about a brownie?" interrupts Debbie Fleming, the magazine's production manager and the only other African-American on staff. Great timing. I'm about to jump over the sheetrock half-wall separating our desks and do my level best to strangle Carlson.

"Cool out, cool out, you all. Jill, let's go get a brownie or something to drink." We walk downstairs to the cafeteria, toward a sugar and caffeine rush.

"What the hell is the matter with these white folks? I wanted to punch that guy in the face."

"I know. That's why I jumped in," Debbie laughs. She has a loud, infectious laugh, recognizable anywhere.

"I guess that was a good thing. All we need is a tall black woman beating up a poor defenseless white man. But that shit makes me so mad."

"I know. But it's not worth getting yourself all worked up about."

"What d' you mean?" I ask through a mouthful of brownie and nuts.

"I've been here almost twenty years. I was around when David Hardy still worked here. When Leon Dash still drank. When Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer. Nothing's changed, except the faces of the black people. Why get into it?" She finishes her cookie and reaches for a cigarette.

"But doesn't it make you so mad?" I ask, lighting her cigarette and mine.

"Not really, not anymore. I ignore it. This is my job. My real life is at home with my crazy kids."

"I hear you, but--"

"No buts. Don't let what goes on in here upset you. Remember, it's only a job." She blows out a cloud of smoke.

I start to argue, but don't. I've got no fight with Debbie. Not only is she a sister, she's a good one. From the git go, she's gone out of her way to make me feel welcome, show me around, explain the tricks, glitches, and loopholes of the institution. I am simultaneously puzzled by and attracted to her transcendent nature, her ability to remain calm in the midst of the chaos inherent in a newsroom.

"You're right. I just couldn't take hearing him talk about 'they' this and 'they' that."

"I know what you mean. But at least he was being honest."

"What do you mean?"

"A lot of the people we work with probably feel the same way, they just won't say it around us. At least we know where he's coming from."

Her words make me think of James Brown wailing about me standing up so he can see where I'm coming from. I can visualize James jamming in the newsroom, his tiny patent-leather-shod feet dancing across the rows of computer terminals. Like Maceo, I want to blow.

"What's funny?" Debbie asks. I tell her. We laugh.

"You're a good sister," I say and smile.

"Thanks." She snuffs out her cigarette, I follow suit. "Ready to go back upstairs? I've got to finish formatting a story."

Abruptly, I am grim again. "As ready as I'll ever be."

Debbie laughs. "It's a job, not your life. Plus, its almost time to go home."

I nod. What I want to do is clutch her shoulders, stare into her eyes, and scream, "I don't have a life!" I have a house, a car, a job, and a daughter, but no life. I haven't made any friends here. I have met no men worth using any brain cells to think about. Between the demands made on me by the job, the black community, my daughter, and myself, by the end of the day I'm so stressed that it's all I can do to drive home up 16th Street without crashing into some other stressed-out drone.

Later, driving home, my mind is preoccupied with getting there as quickly as possible so I can have a drink and relax. For the first time in my life I am now able, from any location, to visualize exactly how much vodka is left in the bottle at any given moment. This is not a good thing.

I turn the car radio on full-blast to drown out my thoughts, distracting myself from visions of frosty vodka gimlets. Rahsaan Roland Kirk's tenor sax teases as he sings, "Oh, volunteer slavery/It's something that we all know/Oh, volunteer slavery, oh volunteer slavery."

Singing along, I catch my reflection in the rearview mirror. I look like the rapper on the cover of the magazine. Haunted, furtive, guilty, the type of Negro no shopkeeper will buzz in, the type white guys will build their careers writing about.

But the truth is, I'm not an outlaw rapper. I'm a volunteer slave, a buppie. My price? A house, a Volvo, and the illusion of disposable income. When it's light out, I convince myself that the quality of the work I do justifies where and for whom I do it. It's in the darkness, black like me, that it's hard. I hurry home to drown my self-disgust in Russian vodka and pray for Harriet Tubman's arrival.
 

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