"How long have you had those, ahem, kind of fantasies, Thurgood?" Melanie Durocher asked, and the fifty-something, five-foot-ten, statuesque and plump, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, matronly Quebecer looked intently at the six-foot-tall, handsome and well-dressed young Black man who sat opposite her. They were at the Tim Horton's located on Metcalfe Street in downtown Ottawa, just two people having an important conversation.
"A while, I guess," Thurgood Rupert replied, and the young African American man looked at Melanie, and sighed. He'd been living in the City of Ottawa, Ontario, for a while, having been sent there by his concerned parents due to the gang violence in the City of Chicago which claimed so many young Black male lives. Thurgood, a native of metropolitan Chicago, missed his home state of Illinois and his buddies, and found the City of Ottawa utterly boring...
"Thurgood, there's nothing with a young man having sexual fantasies about an older woman, these things are quite common," Melanie Durocher replied, with the same patience with which she'd dealt with numerous students while teaching mathematics at Saint Augustin Academy in the City of Montreal, Quebec. Recently retired due to health reasons, Melanie was finding out that one could take the teacher out of the classroom but not the other way around...
As Melanie spoke to Thurgood Rupert, she noticed that a lot of the white male clients inside the Tim Horton's were looking at her and her Black male friend quite disapprovingly. One of those white males was a young white guy holding hands with a chubby Black girlfriend. The fool saw absolutely nothing ironic about what he was doing. White male hypocrisy at its best, Melanie thought with absolute disgust.
Melanie Durocher long ago developed a fascination with Black men and found them more real and more humane than white guys, and more secure in their masculinity too. This isn't a statement that Melanie made to disparage white guys, it was just a simple fact. The average Black man is secure in who he is as a man and doesn't need money, power or influence to make himself feel big, nor does he need to tear down others in order to feel like a real man.
Even in today's racially diverse Canadian society, a lot of people stare when they see a Black man and a white woman together. Melanie Durocher remembered times that used to be much worse. Back in the day, Melanie married a handsome Black man from the island of Haiti, ambitious immigrant and aspiring police officer Phillip Dumont. The two of them got hitched while studying at the University of Montreal, and became the proud parents of Sarah Dumont, Nicole Dumont and Matthew Dumont.
Life was great for the Dumont-Durocher family, until the patriarch Phillip Dumont died of a heart attack while working as a police officer in the environs of Laval during a snow storm. For Melanie Durocher, left to raise two daughters and a son without a husband, life would never be the same. Melanie tried her best, working as a substitute teacher for various schools in the City of Montreal area to make ends meet, and nowadays, things were alright for her brood.
