And there he suddenly was. The perfect picture of the Great White Hunter on, of all places, a Metro bus. The impeccable white shirt, the shadow of a mustache, and the pith helmet protecting his face from the light of an usually bright Northwest summer.

The only reason I entered the bus was to get a better look at this miracle. And what I saw immediately after paying my fare (the realism of his colonial look) spooked the ghosts of my own colonial past—all of those poor and oppressed black subjects of the Empire. I saw myself as the boy in that photo of Henry M. Stanley. He is holding the barrel of a rifle and staring weirdly into his master's back—the back of the master of the 19th century. There is the boy, and there is the man of action—the man feared by natives and big game alike.

But I soon relaxed when I realized that the whole of this colonial world had been reduced to a front seat on the 36. He was now just one of us, a stranger on a bus.