That comment hit Ivan harder than the first. It was well below the belt. He had stopped paying attention to the racial makeup of his website. The money was all talking too loudly, and it wasn’t black money. So Ivan didn’t have an immediate response for her.

Ida caught on to that and asked him, “What’s wrong, Ivan? A white woman got your tongue?”

He quickly remembered how “pro-black” Ida was when he had first met her. She was a real “power to the people” sister, who supported him early on, only for him to scorn her for a Brazilian/Italian hustler, who had left him out to dry. So what could he say about that to redeem himself?

“Actually, no,” he responded meekly. “I haven’t been going that way.”

“You haven’t? Are you sure?”

Ivan had rolled in the hay with a few white women by then. It was practically inevitable in the crowds that he was in, but he never dated one seriously enough to say that he had crossed over. Nevertheless, his preference had not been all black, either. He had landed somewhere in between. Ida fit the script herself. And Ivan told her so.

He said, “Well, you’re not exactly the darkest black woman in the world yourself, Ida. But I’m embarrassed to even get into this conversation.”

“Well, we’re definitely in it, Ivan,” she told him. “And I just wanted to remind you where you started off. Because you didn’t start off over there, and I thought you would have enough strength to fight the right fight. But lately it sure doesn’t look that way.”

She was kicking Ivan’s ass and leaving him speechless. She even had him thinking about what Catherine Boone had been up to lately. Then he thought about his connection to Thomas Jones as his real estate partner, and all of his Urban League contributions. He thought about the Black Contractors Association and how he had utilized them to work on remodeling his club acquisitions. He thought about the National Bankers Association, whom he was presently working with for access to lines of credit to develop more residential homes in the underserved areas of San Diego. He even included the African-American Chamber of Commerce in his business expo event at the convention center.

Thomas Jones had made certain that all the proper connections were served in the African-American community, even though many of their businesses and organizations were not pressured to advertise with IDPromotions.com or sponsor any of Ivan’s web pages. So Ivan calmed his nerves and realized that he had been more of a team player than those who liked to do the talking.