Java Street, Brooklyn

Illustration: Forsyth Harmon

There are two versions of you, now that we’re in this awful before-and-after. And now, in the after, the fact of you as an African-American woman worker within a group of white male construction workers has this whole other tenor. In the before, it just seemed kind of glorious and awesome. In the after, it’s something different: more fraught and vulnerable and painful, in the way that everything now seems more fraught and vulnerable and painful now that we can no longer be only half-awake to hate. In the before, though, you just made me laugh in a way that hardly ever happens with friends let alone strangers: it was that kind of laugh that just ambushes you and overtakes you.

When I got to my bike I saw that constructions workers had tied one end of the tape cordoning off the area to my handlebars. I stood there, taking in this minor stupidity for a moment, and then put my bag down and began trying to unknot it. I could sense the group of them working in the road looking at me, standing in their hole, holding their tools, paused and I kept fumbling with this ridiculous knot — self-conscious, irritated and amused.

“Who did that!” a voice shouted with a kind of expansive weariness, and I looked around and there you were, a black woman, striding towards me in your high-vis vest and hardhat, while the group of guys just stood there. “Knuckleheads!” you said, with emphasis, as you cut the tape. The way you said that word — the affection and exasperation and zeal in it — was so amazing that I wanted you to say it again. And you did: “What a bunch of knuckleheads.” I thanked you for freeing my bike but really I was thanking you for a few things. For making me laugh, and for going to work every day, for putting up with all the bullshit that entailed. In that moment, you were literally a black woman clearing up the mess of a group of dumb white men.