A friend of mine told me that her eight year old daughter, who was watching TV at the time, suddenly asked, "Mommy, when did the world turn color?" She'd evidently been thinking, as an eight year old child would, that the world had once been black and white until a certain time, and then everything suddenly bloomed into color.
I've been writing all these posts about race, mostly to look at my own experience with it, to pick it up turn it around my hands, always with the hidden fear that I've forgotten some chunk of experience--that it's somehow metastasized within me as unacknowledged racism. Some of that history, I'm glad to see again. The photo of the drinking fountain, for example, reminds me of the child I once was, when such sights were magical rather than an ugly reminder of Jim Crow.
My earliest years, as I think I've said elsewhere, were spent up North. By the time my family moved to DC, I was seven years old. I don't remember seeing Colored and White drinking fountains in Washington, nor do I remember seeing them in Virginia. Surely they were there, but maybe I never encountered them. It wasn't until a summer vacation in Oklahoma that I noticed two drinking fountains labeled Colored and White.
Of course, I pitched a fit to drink from the Colored fountain. Who wouldn't have?
Who wouldn't have wanted red, green, blue, purple, yellow, pink, turquoise and lavender waters splashing up in her face?
I've been writing all these posts about race, mostly to look at my own experience with it, to pick it up turn it around my hands, always with the hidden fear that I've forgotten some chunk of experience--that it's somehow metastasized within me as unacknowledged racism. Some of that history, I'm glad to see again. The photo of the drinking fountain, for example, reminds me of the child I once was, when such sights were magical rather than an ugly reminder of Jim Crow.
My earliest years, as I think I've said elsewhere, were spent up North. By the time my family moved to DC, I was seven years old. I don't remember seeing Colored and White drinking fountains in Washington, nor do I remember seeing them in Virginia. Surely they were there, but maybe I never encountered them. It wasn't until a summer vacation in Oklahoma that I noticed two drinking fountains labeled Colored and White.
Of course, I pitched a fit to drink from the Colored fountain. Who wouldn't have?
Who wouldn't have wanted red, green, blue, purple, yellow, pink, turquoise and lavender waters splashing up in her face?
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