The man sighed and looked back into the restaurant before looking again at Stacey. “That’s not possible.”
Stacey looked past the man into the room. “I see empty tables—”
“Not for you,” the man abruptly interrupted. “This is my restaurant and I’ve got a right to choose the people I serve and where to serve them. Now if you want something to eat, we’ll serve you, but not inside. There’s a door you can go to in back and you can order from there. Food will be the same as served in here—”
Clayton Chester stepped forward, his movement threatening. “We just came back from fighting your war!”
Stacey cut him off with an outstretched hand. “Clayton,” he quietly said, and we all understood. It was an order. Man looked at Stacey and advanced no farther, like a soldier recognizing an order from a superior-ranking officer. “All right,” Stacey said to the restaurant owner, “as long as we can get some food.” I wanted to say something, but out of respect to my brother, I kept my mouth shut.
“Fine,” said the man. “I’ll send word that you’re coming around.” He turned to go.
“Wait,” Stacey said, stopping him. “You don’t mind, could we just order here? Both my brothers, they’re veterans. They just came back from fighting over in Europe. I figure it’s a shame we have to go all the way to the back door just so two soldiers can get some food. Even in Germany they didn’t have to do that. They fought the same war as these fellows did.” Stacey motioned toward the soldiers seated in the dining area.
The restaurateur looked again at Christopher-John and Clayton Chester. “All right, all right, since you’re veterans, I’ll take your order, but you’ll have to wait outside until we bring it to you.” He pulled a pad from his vest. “Now, what do you want?”
Man looked at Stacey and went outside without another word. Stacey watched him go, then said to Christopher-John and me, “You both go with him. I’ll order for us.” Christopher-John immediately did as Stacey ordered, but I stayed. “Cassie—”
“I want to order with you,” I insisted. “Go ahead.”
“I’ll take care of it, Cassie,” said Stacey. “Go on out.”
“Are you going to order or not?” The restaurant man was growing impatient.
Stacey ordered. “We’ll have eight cheeseburgers, four milk-shakes—two strawberry, two chocolate. Four large orders of fries, four orders of onion rings, and—”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” the man said as he tried to keep up with the order. “Give me time to get this all down.” He took a moment and said, “What else? You want some dessert?”
“You have apple pie, chocolate cake?” asked Stacey.
“Yeah, got both.”
“Then we’ll take both. Four apple pies, fours slices of chocolate cake.”
“That it?”
“And oh, yes, coffee. Four large coffees with sugar and cream.”
“All right, I’ll figure this for you and get it ordered. You can pay me, then you can wait out at the bottom of the steps.”
Stacey glanced toward the seated uniformed soldiers. “You make all your veterans and their families pay before they get their meals?”
The man glanced back too and relented. “All right, go on, wait outside. We’ll bring your order to you.”
Outside, Christopher-John and Little Man were not around. We figured they had gone back to the car, parked on the other side of the building. “You’d better go on and join them, Cassie,” Stacey said as we went down the restaurant steps.
“No,” I said. “I’ll just wait here with you, but I want to know why you ordered all that food when we can’t eat in there.”
“Just go on, Cassie,” was all Stacey said. I stayed with him.
The wait was some thirty minutes or more. Restaurant patrons came and went. Finally, the restaurant door opened and the restaurant owner emerged with a young man behind him carrying a large box. The owner motioned to us. “Come on up, you two. I got your food.”
Stacey had been leaning against the post railing with his back to the restaurant. Now he straightened and turned toward the restaurant and looked at the man. “On second thought, we decided we don’t want your food.”
“What?”
“Said we don’t want your food. Changed our minds. We can’t eat your food inside at one of your tables, we decided we don’t want to eat your food at all.”
“You—you can’t do that! Not after we fixed all this! We’ve got a bill here!”
“You said you’ve got a right to serve who you choose, and we figure we have a right to refuse your service. So, we are refusing your service. We don’t want your food.”
The restaurateur’s face turned fiery. “This is what I get for trying to be nice to you damn niggers! You’re going to pay for this order!”
Stacey said nothing. He took my arm and started away.
“You get back here!” yelled the man. “I’ll have the police after you!”
Stacey now stopped and looked back. “Won’t be the first time,” he said. Then once again he turned, and we walked on with the manager yelling after us. Refusing food we had ordered might have seemed an insignificant way of fighting back, but at times, insignificant ways were all we had, all that allowed us a little dignity as human beings. We knew the way of things down home in the South, but this was Wyoming. We had thought maybe things would be different here, in the great American West. We were wrong.
It was clear.
Being colored was a way of life in America, and it was a full-time job.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
None of us had ever driven through mountains like these before. Stacey was at the wheel. He was the most experienced. He had driven trucks throughout the South and knew better than any of us how to handle the road, but the curves of the mountain roads were challenging. Massive rock formed a sheer mountain wall towering far above on one side of the road while on the other, the land dropped off steeply into the far depths of a valley. I was afraid of this rugged land, yet had never seen land of such awesome beauty. As Stacey swerved around the mountain curves, hitting speed limits way too high, we all kept looking back, waiting for the siren of a police car. We were in Wyoming, the wild West, but we might as well have been in Mississippi. The romance of the West as portrayed throughout America was not for us. For us, America remained as always, the same. Whites Only. Colored Not Allowed.
I was learning about America.