Django Unchained’s Sheba: an unlikely role model?

I was frustrated. I hadn’t asked for a Tesla when I made the rental car reservation. I certainly hadn’t asked for a Tesla with the pre-set user name Papa Simp. (I move my seat back, and up pops the notification: “Papa Simp has adjusted his posture.” Oh, I’ll just bet he has.) And now, here was Papa Simp, helplessly watching a squeaky cargo train slide lazily through the crossing before which Tesla’s navigation had mistakenly stranded me — the overpass was one block over — thus ensuring that I would not reach this small town’s liquor store before closing. It had been a day.

Papa Simp durst not return to The Wife empty handed, so I pulled into the parking lot of the Shell station mini-mart situated just to my left, and found her a tallboy of Blue Moon. The friendly black woman behind the counter asked how my day had been. “Long. Yours?”

“I had a Karen today,” she replied, rolling her eyes but keeping her tone even and sweet. I asked if Karen had asked to speak to her manager, but she wasn’t hearing me. “Eleven minutes, she stood where you’re standing. I had 600 customers today, and she was there for eleven minutes. It got to the point where she was questioning my qualifications for this position. I’m just looking at her and thinking, ‘I will be your husband’s black bitch. Remember Leo in Django [Unchained]? How he had that black concubine? I will be that; I will do all the nasty shit that you won’t do for him. And I’ll take all that money from centuries of reparation. All because you had to do this.’ But I didn’t say anything; I kept it professional.”

What could I say? I congratulated her on her professionalism, even as I marveled at the sidling slyness of her proposed mode of retaliation, the on-point reference to a cinematic counterpart, the fantastical expansion of scope from bedroom to boardroom. It put me in mind of the old saying, “Everything is about sex, except sex — sex is about power.”

As fate would have it — well, maybe not fate; it was a small town — I found myself in the same mini-mart the next afternoon, this time accompanied by The Wife. She was looking for a bubbly mineral water. There was none to be had. “I’m so sorry,” said the same friendly black woman behind the counter, in the same even and sweet tone of voice. “We’ve just been so busy this weekend, and we’re out of a bunch of stuff.” Fortunately, The Wife is not a Karen; she found some other beverage and the two of them got to chatting. The would-be vengeful concubine allowed as how she was looking forward to Mother’s Day at her church, when all the men would cook breakfast after the service for the ladies of the congregation.

It must have been quite an eleven minutes.