Taxi driver

In the summer of 1973 I drove a taxi in Texarkana.

One day, dispatch sent me to pick up a fare at the bus station. When I got there, a woman waved from the sidewalk. She was fortyish, slender, wearing a brown-gray jacket and skirt and white blouse.

I stopped and got out and opened the passenger door. She said, “Thank you.” I put her suitcase in the trunk and got back in the cab. She told me her address.

Just as I was about to back out, I heard a man calling. “Hey, hey, hey!” I stopped and rolled down the window. A black man in his early 40s said, “Can you get them to send a colored driver? He’ll know where I want to go.”

“Sure,” I said. I radioed to dispatch, “Cab 17. A man at the bus station wants a colored driver.”

Dispatch replied: “Ten-four.”

I said to the man, “The cab will be here in a couple of minutes.”

“Thank you,” the man said.

When I rolled up the window, my passenger said from the back seat: “Prejudiced m-----f-----.” I kind of chuckled.

The woman said she lived in California, but owned a house in Texarkana. She inherited the house when her parents died. I don’t remember what she said she did in California. Maybe she didn’t say. I wondered, though. An attractive, well-dressed black woman taking a bus from Los Angeles to Texarkana and she talked as though her travel was a common occurrence … It was rather mysterious.

I took her to her house and opened the cab door and got her suitcase from the trunk. “Thank you,” she said.

The strangest thing was the dispatcher’s voice when I said a man wanted a “colored driver” – “Ten-four,” as though it was a common, everyday occurrence. Maybe it was.