Aggie and the Woman, Part 1

I spoke in my previous post about the transformative short story I wrote about a woman who had more in common with me as a person than I’d ever known in my own written fiction before. Happily sharing that short story with you in daily excerpts. See below for Part 1.

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Aggie and the Woman

For the past four months, Agnes Boateng found herself sitting across from the same woman on the train. It was a feat to notice the same face in an endless sea of people, much less to end up seated adjacent to one another every day, but she guessed that they left their jobs around the same time. The woman was clearly a professional; typically clad in a smart pantsuit and tapping away at the keys on her mobile phone like most of the other commuters. But there was something else. When she first saw the woman, the excitement that ran through Aggie was undeniable: she had found another brown person.

Having moved to Switzerland six months ago and subsequently starting her new job as an economist at an international banking firm in Geneva, it was rather easy to pick Aggie out of the commuting (and general) crowd; she was usually the only person of color, a quick-to-find Waldo in a scene of cookie cutter people. That first afternoon when she saw the woman sitting across from her was a moment worthy of celebration, especially since the woman also appeared to be African like her.

One afternoon, while once again studying the woman seated across from her on the train, Aggie wondered if she was East African. The woman’s distinct, angular features seemed to point that she was either Kenyan or Sudanese. If her father were there, he would of course know. She certainly hadn’t inherited his uncanny ability to correctly guess the ethnicity of just about every African person he saw. (When she was 14, her raging curiosity about the accuracy of one of his guesses inspired Aggie to race back to an elderly woman they had passed at Makola Market to ask where she was from; to her infinite shock, the woman had confirmed that, yes, she was indeed from the nation of Chad as her father had presumed.)

She wore a gray pantsuit with a bright pink blouse underneath the blazer; her coily hair sat atop her head in a large bun. The enormous diamond ring on her left index finger sparkled underneath the train’s overhead lights as her fingers rapidly moved across the phone’s keys. Naturally, as a result of Aggie’s open, fixed gaze, the woman suddenly looked up. Meeting Aggie’s eyes, she flashed a broad smile at her before peering back down. Despite Aggie’s slight embarrassment at being caught staring (“your eyes can be too much,” her mother liked to say), she took the woman’s smile as a gesture of solidarity. We’re in this together, her smile seemed to say to Aggie. You and me and our dark skin and our giant Afros.