Stalking

[wnylib]

28. That's quite a situation to be in.

Regarding speaking directly, When I remarried, my second husband and I moved to Cleveland for his job. Initially, I worked for a temp agency to get to know the city and job market. One assignment was in the advertising department of a large multinational corporation. The young woman in the job was off for a month for medical care. I learned from other employees that, although the medical leave appeared to be legitimate, she often took time off that wasn't, and often without notice or calling in. When she was there, she did a lot of socializing with employees and accomplished very little. She seemed to like the income but not the work.

I had some advertising experience and was able to pick up the job quickly. My boss on the job site, the director of advertising, told me that he thought the regular employee would quit as soon as she found another job. He said that if she did, he would call me and hire me to replace her. He asked me to stay on for a week after she returned to get her up to date on what happened while she was off.

After she returned, she heard from other employees that I might be hired to replace her. I had not told anyone about that, but I suspect that someone overheard what the boss said to me since his door was open at the time.

This employee was Black. I am White. She spoke to me in a low but threatening tone in the little cubicle where her desk was. Nobody could hear her. She said, "I know all about White people who get jobs just because they're White. This is an affirmative action job and if I leave it, it will go to another Black woman. If I ever hear about you getting this job, I will kill you."

So I said, loudly, for everyone to hear, "You'll do WHAT? You'll kill me if I get hired?" She immediately said, "Shh. Everyone can hear you." I said, "That's right. I want them to hear me. Nobody threatens me in silence."

She was so young and so inexperienced in the work world that it was obvious to me that she was very insecure. She had been hired for a good job but found that it wasn't the kind of work that she liked, but she hung onto it anyway. Maybe she feared that she would not get another good job due to racism. I think that despite the company's equal opportunity policy she probably experienced subtle forms of racism and thought that she was being pressured to quit. It might have accounted for her absenteeism. All this passed through my mind quickly, out of awareness of racism and some of its effects on people. I said some of that directly to her. I invited her to join me the next day when my husband met me for lunch. She asked why and I said that she might like meeting a White person who had helped some young Black people get a leg up in education and jobs.

When I met my second husband, who was also White, he was a grad student who worked for a program at the university that gave supportive tutoring and job advisement to Black students to overcome educational gaps caused by poor school systems.

She accepted my offer and throughout lunch talked to my husband about matching job skills with her interests, and about job and educational opportunities. She thanked both of us.

I finished out the week on the job with her and went on to the next temp assignment. I don't know if she stayed on that job, got a different one, or went on to take classes. The company never called me about the job but I didn't care. I had other opportunities and eventually went to work for an ad agency.