La Negra Blanca
Roxane Gay
At the club, Sarah goes by Sierra. The manager gave her the name the day she was hired four years earlier. He asked if she had a preference but she shrugged, took a sip of warm soda, told him to knock himself out. He looked her up and down and up again. “Sierra,” he said. “So you’ll turn your head when your name is called.”
Sometimes, when she’s opening the refrigerator, or reaching into a drawer for a pair of shorts, Sarah will catch herself swiveling her hips and arching her back. Even when she’s not on the pole, she’s dancing around it. She takes a lot of Advil because even at home she’s always hearing the thump thump thump of the bass line.
Candy, her best friend at work, took one look at Sarah on her first day and told Sarah to dance to black girl booty shaking music because guys love to see white girls with juicy asses shake their stuff. Sarah blushed, and pivoted to get a better look at her ass. She said, “My ass is juicy?”
Candy laughed and grabbed a handful of Sarah’s ass, but Sarah already knew she had a juicy ass and where it came from. Her mother is black and her father is white but for years people have assumed she’s a white girl because she has green eyes and straight blonde hair. She’s not ashamed of who she is but in Baltimore it’s easier to be a white girl with a black girl’s ass than to be a black girl who looks white or any other kind of black girl for that matter.
Her signature move is to grip the pole with both hands, arch her back and slide lower until her long hair brushes the stage while frantically rocking her pelvis up and down. She hates the pole, how it is always warm and sticky to the touch, coated in human oils, and also how when she’s leaning back or wrapping her leg around the pole or hanging upside down while shaking her tits, she’s not doing anything special, not really.
Sarah hates the smell of ones and fives but can live with the stench of bigger bills. She tans three days a week, naked, so there are no lines. She sees an esthetician for a full body waxing once or twice a month, enhances her hairstyle with blonde extensions replaced every two months. She works out for two hours a day, seven days a week, eats fourteen hundred calories a day. It is an exhausting regimen but an occupational hazard. She attends Johns Hopkins during the week, where tuition costs almost forty thousand dollars, and financial aid only covers two-thirds of that cost. Sarah pays for the rest out of her own pocket. She has one year remaining before she graduates with degrees in International Studies and Romance Languages, plus coursework in Arabic. She plans on working for the CIA because she has become quite efficient at passing.
At first, Sarah was a mess of a stripper. She couldn’t dance. She didn’t like being watched. She didn’t want to be touched. She hated the pretense of the gowns that quickly hit the floor when she was on stage or giving a lap dance. She hated the improbable heels and the G-string panties riding up her ass and the way she stank of smoke after a long night and how she always had to look over her shoulder as she walked to her car at the end of a shift. Still, she didn’t relish wearing a polyester uniform and visor cap either. Sarah took Candy’s advice and started watching BET for the necessary instruction. In the privacy of her apartment in Towson, she tried to clap her ass and bounce and shake her body like the girls in the videos and the girls she grew up with in West Baltimore who moved so fast and with such elegant precision.
* * *
William Livingston III mostly lives to watch Sierra dance to Lil Jon’s "Get Low." He’s willing to pay for the privilege. He likes Sierra’s routine—how she points to the window, to the wall, and mimics the sweat dripping down her proverbial balls. He visits her at the club three times a week, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. He stays for two hours. He tips her anywhere between one hundred and five hundred dollars. After she dances to "Get Low," Sierra gives him a lap dance, shimmying out of her skimpy gown, draping it over William’s shoulder. She straddles his lap and sexily removes her bra, wrapping it around his balding head and then loops it around his neck like a leash. She squeezes her breasts together, flicks her tongue across her nipples, feels William's cock stiffen between the spread of her thighs. She leans in to his chest, but pulls away before she gets too close.
The more money he slides beneath the narrow waistband of her G-string, the lower and harder she grinds her hips. If Sierra looks down and sees a crown of bills wrapping her waist, she’ll let William hold her ass even though he always leaves little bruises. He propositions Sierra regularly. He wants to fuck her in a restaurant bathroom. He wants to take her to a fine hotel and sip champagne from her body, feed her cold grapes. He wants to tongue her navel and shower her with bling and ride her doggy style. William hasn’t yet figured out her price. He was making progress until one day he said, “I want to fuck you filthy because my wife is a goddamned prude.” Sierra pushed William away, said, “I can’t believe what you just said.”
She told him he was back at square one, so he started coming to the club four nights a week, told his wife he found a new bridge group.
* * *
Sierra tries to leave Sarah at home but often fails. She is wracked with guilt when she thinks about all the married men who leer from the tip rail and sit in the darkened booths with their legs wide open lamenting all the dirty things their wives won’t do. Sarah finds such conversations impolite and having seen so much too much of these men, she bears not a small amount of sympathy for their women.
After her shift, Sarah goes to the diner a few doors down from the club, her face scrubbed clean. She wears a t-shirt and jeans, her hair swept up in a neat ponytail. She sits at an empty table and carefully smoothes out the bills she’s accumulated, separating them into piles by denomination. Sometimes, a waiter named Alvarez will sit with her counting out his own tips. She is desperately in love with Alvarez because he doesn’t ask her out, because his hands are gentle and clean, because he doesn’t say anything unkind about her profession even though he smells it on her. He keeps her coffee fresh and brings her big salads with dressing on the side, then gives her foil-wrapped Handi-Wipes to clean her hands with after she’s done calculating her worth for that night.
Alvarez loves Sarah with equal fervor but he’s illegal, sin papeles, and worries what would happen if one thing led to another. Alvarez is a worrier. As a baby in Honduras, his mother would find her beautiful boy in his crib, not crying but fretting, chewing on the slender wisps of his baby fingernails. On nights when he’s too tired or foolish to worry, he’ll sit on the same side of the booth as Sarah and hold her hand. He’ll whisper to her in Spanish. Sometimes, he’ll sing his favorite song, "Volver" by Estrella Morente. As Alvarez sings, he taps the table in a steady beat and Sarah sways from side to side and sometimes she sings along too. He loves the song because he loves the name Estrella, which means star. He has named their imaginary daughter Estrella. When he walks Sarah to her car, he’ll point up to the night sky and say, “Mira las estrellas,” and Sarah will look up and her heart will beat fiercely, tenderly.
* * *
