Colored Waiting Room
 Patricia Pope
 (Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
 2002 Trafford Publishing
 ISBN: 1553691369

A fierce thriller about the first Black woman hired by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Colored Waiting Room is as much a woman's story, any first woman's story in a world of men, as it is a story of a Black woman's story alone in a world where no one gives a damn about her, not her lover, nor her friends & certainly not her co-workers, who are all white.

So is set the stage for a tragedy as inexorable as any in the Classics. I have categorized Colored Waiting Room as a thriller because more than it is literature, from the start, it is a thriller as Alberta Graham counts sticks of dynamite & feeds the flames of a pure yet complex hatred.

Alberta Graham had been a Texas woman of determination: proud, competent & dreaming of becoming the first female shift lieutenant at the Cherokee Nuclear Plant. That was eight years ago. Eight years of surviving the “good ole boy” network of harassment, rumors, not-so-subtle threats, & a host of unwritten rules which changed with each shift.

The only other female officer opts to work nights & Lieutenant Graham must struggle on in this alien world, alone & betrayed by both employer & the Federal system, Equal Opportunity Employment notwithstanding.

Nothing is as it seems until on foot patrol, Alberta descends some steps into a forgotten area “hidden behind mounds of pipes in the cavernous Power Building area. Totally obscure, these steps led to a small crawl space that led her through a maze of darkness...[to a] sullen room,” where she stares around in the dimness. “The words COLORED WAITING ROOM were boldly inscribed on the wall.” She realizes that this must have been “the secret refuge place for some employee of the past who had experienced a need to escape the ridicule and racist behavior prevalent at the Cherokee Plant.” (Page 71)

Patricia Pope has written a difficult story about “the submission of one's will” & the unraveling & destruction of one single woman, in a struggle against deception & misuse of power among traditionally racist men resentful of the intrusion of a lone black woman into their closed white society. It did not escape me that this drama is played out in the frightening & deadly arena of a TVA nuclear plant.

Colored Waiting Room is a gripping read which will leave you drenched with the stench of racism, impotence & a dreadfully poignant rage.

2 teapots because many times I wished Patricia Pope had hired the skills of an editor, however, the story still raises my hackles & makes me wish I'd known Lieutenant Alberta Graham -- I would have walked those patrols with her.
(08/10/03)

Rebecca