I entered his home office with fear and loathing. The room was as big as my entire first floor, lined with rich cherrywood bookcases stuffed with legal books, several obscure Lawyer of the Year awards, and a lion head mounted on the wall behind his desk. Several times a year Mortimer went on exotic hunting expeditions with his stuffed shirt cronies from the bar association, always returning home with another grisly trophy for his collection. There wasn’t a room in the house where I didn’t feel the glass eyes of a caribou or a muskox or a grizzly bear staring down mournfully at me. Shooting defenseless beasts was Old Morty’s way of compensating for the fact he probably hadn’t gotten his wrinkly willy up in twenty years.

Although Mortimer worked from his multimillion-dollar Tudor home in the ritzy Squirrel Hill North neighborhood, he always wore a suit. As if he slept and showered in one. Never once, not even when he came down with COVID last year, did I ever see him in anything but a jacket, trousers, and shined shoes. Mortimer was as stiff as his starched shirt.

Sitting at his antique Kittinger desk, his wrinkled hands were focused on peeling an apple with the paring knife he demanded moments ago.

“What would it cost me to convince you to join me for a dinner with the partners on Friday night?” His icy blue eyes rose to ogle me—lingering on my legs—before returning to the apple peel that fell to the table, which I would later be expected to clean up. One white caterpillar eyebrow was raised in anticipation of a win. He always won.

“What’s the dinner for?” I asked.

While he was still the managing partner of his law firm, he rarely showed his face at the office anymore. Most of my job entailed that of a trophy assistant, running personal errands with the occasional trip to his downtown Pittsburgh office to pick up files for the more demanding cases that required the input of “the best lawyer east of the Mississippi.” His words, not mine.

“I need to impress some potential clients, but we have to show more diversity in our firm. Since you’re Black, but not too Black, I thought it would look good to have you there.”

Not too Black. I guess I was light enough to impress these pricks but not too dark to embarrass him.

I should have known not to be so bold to assume I had anything else to offer him but my skin color. Mortimer Randolph would have fit in perfectly during the days when selling people was as normal as selling cotton. But my leaky plumbing and rotting floorboards demanded I take advantage of the offer. Maybe if I could pretend it was an acting gig of sorts I could suffer through it…

I thought: How much do de job pay, massa? I said: “What’s the pay?”