For Her, Racial Barriers Don’t Exist

Too often, deliverymen entering the offices of Essentially Chocolate and The Basket Gallery, a Rockville-based gourmet gift company, breeze past a petite woman with flawless brown skin and red-painted lips and stride up to a young blond woman seated nearby.

“So you’re the owner?” they ask the blonde.

“No, that’s the owner,” she says, pointing at Jill Patton, the heretofore ignored black woman.

“Oh!” they blurt.

There’s a world of subtext buried in that “Oh!” - as Patton and countless African Americans realize. As a reporter, I’ve spent 20 minutes on the phone chatting up an interview subject, arranged an in-person meeting and arrived on schedule. Ignored, I’ve announced my identity - and heard, “Oh!”

Now perhaps these people expected someone older or younger or better dressed. Perhaps they were distracted.

Or maybe their “Oh!” resulted from the assumption that a black person couldn’t be the reporter - someone doing so well.

Patton says that sometimes at gourmet food shows, where vendors hawk Swiss cheese sticks and Belgian chocolates, sellers have dismissively told her, “Our minimum is $500.” When she replies, “I’ll need $6,000” worth of the product, she gets the “Oh!”

“Really, it’s no big deal,” says Patton, 30, whose elegant baskets and treats have been featured in Bon Appetit, Good Housekeeping and Chocolatier. “Once they realize who I am and why I’m there, all that falls away. … “

She shrugs. “I just don’t have time to worry about it.”

Successful blacks, like other successful people, have little time to dwell on anything as unproductive as “Oh!” - or as fascinating as their own increasing numbers.

So, few may have analyzed the studies showing that the percentage of black families making more than $50,000 annually has more than doubled since 1971, or that between 1950 and 1990, the percentage of black workers employed as professionals or managers jumped from 5 percent to nearly 20 percent. They’re too busy being professionals or managers.

Or entrepreneurs. In 1992, at age 26, Patton was considering what many would find unthinkable: choosing the risk of purchasing a business over the security of accepting one of three $50,000 job offers. But entrepreneurship, she explains, “felt like breathing. … It flows for me.”

It always has. Growing up in a two-bedroom apartment with her divorced mom and little sister, Patton was always selling: handmade pillows to neighbors, candy bars - at a 100 percent markup - to schoolmates. In 1983, as a high school senior, she was pictured in a local newspaper , perched in an executive’s chair during a program for students interested in the corporate world.

Graduating from the University of Maryland, Patton worked as a computer consultant but longed to use her penchant for “always staying the latest, working on weekends without … asking for overtime” in her own business. She says she’s like her mom, an English teacher who designed and implemented a reading program for underachievers while raising two daughters alone. Today, Patton’s mother, Patricia Conn, is superintendent of schools in Richmond, Va.

Rejecting the job offers, Patton and her husband, a policeman, bought The Basket Gallery in 1992, switched to mail order, and acquired Essentially Chocolate two years later. Today, they employ four people full time and eight part time; 75 percent of their clients are corporate.

Next year, Patton hopes to establish a scholarship for girls from single-parent homes, “the norm where I grew up.”

If she’s different from others with similarly modest beginnings, she says, it may be in that too often “they see obstacles as obstacles.”

What should they see them as?

“Oh, as opportunities,” she says. “Opportunities to learn.”

Like the time her first business loan application was rejected and Patton rang up the bank to ask why. “I grilled (the officer) for 30 minutes. If she wasn’t going to give me a loan, she was going to tell me how to get one.” Revising the request, she got a loan from another bank.

Recently, Patton teasingly asked her mother - who now lives in a large home with an indoor pool - why they couldn’t have had such luxuries years ago.

“There were some lessons I had to learn to get here,” her mom replied.

We all have our lessons, Patton admits. If she has children, she figures, “they’ll have a drastically different life than I did … a two-parent home … a middle-class neighborhood.”

What about the obstacle that trips up many blacks?

“Racism will exist for them,” Patton begins. “But - how do I put this? … I think my kids will understand not to take ‘no’ for an answer. … They’ll know not to be limited by someone saying no.”

Or even “Oh!”

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