Avalanche(white shame)

[dukealien]

avalanche(white shame)



I felt the eyes graze my figure as I crossed the rusted threshold to the room; no pale faces illuminated the shadows and I repaired to a lonely chair before the bar. I extended my hand to the bartender and declared, "Whiskey, please," and he promptly delivered the house variety with a fervent smile. I shot my tumbler, seemingly in unison with three other patrons who had since quashed my isolation at the bar stools. I had always savored the shriek of blues licks: they seemed to slice the smoky air which hovered incandescently above, featured by the neon bulbs attached to slender stands about the stage. One man, seated directly at a table opposite me, nodded up and down with the supple neck of ethyl alcohol bliss and I pretended not to see, lowering my head toward the ash-strewn carpet which shivered with the bass drum. The music began to caress me and I began to anticipate each dip and ascension of the melody; it was a wet fusion of big-city blues and funk.

For a moment I forgot the growing circumference of blackness about me; for an instant I was a spectator among spectators, an ear among ears. Suddenly I realized that I was nearly completely encircled, save for a slight vulnerability which a couple, gone away to dance, had left in their wake. The music had ceased to hoist me and had become scarcely more than a collective whisper of cymbals- it was at that moment I craved flight. No one seemed to gaze at me, to gesture at me, but I was suspended nonetheless by something evanescent, something which stifled my bearings: I felt my breaths drawing closer and shorter together as the jet black footsteps crashed about me like mortars: they seemed to rise from the ground and castigate me for my whiteness, their glowing eyes perforating me down to the very blood and heritage which placed me here and they there. I felt I could breathe no longer among the suffocating steaminess of their weaving, their savage dance; I knew I would be trampled under the homogeneous wave of scorn. I rose, shivered, and spotted the conspicuous gap in the circle, still beckoning me. I went out, strangely calm- the bouncer who had greeted me before smiled at me, gesturing toward the stage: “You come back now, for the second set. They haven’t even got started good yet.”

Upon returning home I felt a tinge of shame creep over me like a sticky fly

This is quite good - I could see it as an excerpt from a hard-boiled detective novel, Marlowe in the "it's a colored place now" scene without the Moose along to shoot the place up.

The locus of shame is obvious (the narrator) but of what, exactly, is he ashamed?  The complex stimulus of jazz, or enjoying it in the company of people he's programmed to disrespect?  Or in being, in that way, *like* those disrespected people?  Modern psychologists would say it's fear, but fear in what key?