Her Black Mistress

 

It had always seemed to me that the name of the Secret Service ought to be changed. I mean, there wasn't anything secret about the organization anymore. That thought had occurred to me when they'd first recruited me in college, and I still thought it entirely valid.

How had I gotten recruited? I was in my next to last year in Financial Accounting. I had come to believe, more and more, that the career path I'd chosen, mostly because I was good at numbers, was going to be a very boring one. Oh, at first, the formulas had been challenging enough, but after a while I just got bored of it all.

Only with so much invested already, in terms of time and energy, not to mention money, I couldn't simply quit and start anew at something else. That was especially so since I didn't know what else I'd prefer.

The Secret Service doesn't just protect the President and other big shots. Most of its efforts are directed at counterfeiting and major fraud. Now that sounded interesting! Oh, I'd have to do their silly little training thing, which would include learning about guns and self-defense, but really, that was just a formality. I'd never have a use for any of it. I'd be working in an office going over accounting figures.

That was pretty much what they told me anyway.

But a funny thing happened after I graduated, went to the Secret Service Academy, and graduated from there. I learned that junior agents tended to be stuck with the worst jobs. That didn't surprise me. What surprised me was that the worst jobs for the Secret Service didn't involve sitting at a desk going over figures, but protecting people.

Yes, being on the President's detail had a certain cachet in terms of prestige, but that wasn't where they put junior agents. The Secret Service was also responsible for providing bodyguards for senators and congressmen, for other members of the government deemed at risk, and for foreign VIPs in the United States.

The thing is, in 99.999 percent of the time in these jobs, the most exciting thing that might happen is you annoy your protectee, and get a black mark on your career. Because, by and large, the people you're protecting are big shots, and the Secret Service, like any other agency, is devoted to sucking up to big shots.

So what do you do? Most of the time you stand around a lot doing nothing, watching for evil assassins that aren't going to make an appearance, and being bored out of your skull. You don't even stand around where anything is going on. You stand around outside the closed doors to offices, watching hallways.

Ugh.

I was not looking forward to it. The older agents seemed to enjoy regaling us with stories about how boring it was and how unpleasant the people were we were supposed to be protecting. Most of them were not very important, but liked to think they were.

I was assigned to protect the Ambassador from Tanzania. Why me? Because the ambassador was a woman, and they had asked for a woman after some white pride group in Idaho had threatened her. It seemed ridiculous to me, but nobody asked my opinion. Which was how I wound up being assigned as her personal bodyguard for a while.

Her name was Zamile Diamini, and meeting her was an experience. I grew up in New Hampshire. We don't have a lot of Black people in New Hampshire, so I was expecting a Whitney Houston or Beyonce, or maybe Oprah Winfrey. That is, the Black women American television focused on.

Most Black women on TV in America are light of skin, with features which often show more than a trace of Caucasian or Arabic ancestry somewhere in the gene pool. Zamile Diamini was 100% Zulu warrior princess, with skin as dark as the ace of spades. She was tall and lithely muscled, with a narrow face with high cheekbones and bright brown eyes.

She had short, curly hair, disdaining the habit of so many African American women to try and make their hair resemble that of Whites and Asians. Her nose was narrow and aristocratic, and she had soft lips and perfect teeth, which surprised me, she coming from Africa (and yes, I was pretty ignorant about Africa).

Oh, and she was a bitch. Make that a Bitch, with a capital B. Everyone pretty much agreed on that score. So why did we put up with her? Because the State Department was sucking up to them, something about rare minerals some American mining companies wanted to get out of them, and a base the military wanted. So pleasing them was important.