Goines On: Shaving thoughts

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For the several-hundredth time, while Goines was shaving, he thought of one of the three white ladies to whom he had been a colored maid, à la the 2011 film The Help. 2011 was the year two of the white ladies entered his life, after UNC’s Office of the President was shaken up by the retirement of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and his replacement took his place, bringing along from her previous gig the assistant who had done her bidding there and would continue to do it at UNC, while supervising Goines.

    Was it the smell of the shaving cream? It had probably been Edge gel in 2011, but now Goines was using Gillette Fusion gel. Maybe they had similar ingredients. Or maybe it was just the act of doing once again something he had done for 45 years before in preparation for leaving for work – very often wearing a tie.
    Goines also often thought of his father, of shaving his father’s face after a stroke had debilitated him in his early ’70s. Goines could still see his father twisting his mouth so Goines could navigate the treacherous terrain around his father’s lips with the single Gillette blade. Goines twisted his own mouth now to scrape the Gillette 5-blade stack safely around his own lips.
    One morning before going to work at UNC, Goines now remembered, he had nicked himself and his supervisor asked what happened, as though it weren’t obvious. “I cut myself shaving,” Goines had admitted.

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