Cupcake Stories

On so pretty a cupcake, these words were scrawled
A delicious white on a background of pink:
“A gentleman saw a poor African man walking slowly up a set of stairs,
the tendons in his ankle jutting out of his tightly stretched skin. The gentleman
called, ‘It is a good morning, my blue friend.’ The poor man turned around, and
smoothed his dirty shirt with shaking hands. ‘It is a good morning, sir, but I am
black.’”
And the gentleman was shocked- he thought race had died, and all he knew were
the colors of a type. A type who was dirty or clean or intelligent or silent. Neither
good nor bad, just a fact across all.
But there was something in this poor man, something noble and salient, that made
the gentleman wonder if maybe he should look at his own color beneath the skin.