I wasn't too old--five, six maybe--before I realized something was very, very wrong with this world I'd been born into.
Things just weren't adding up.
What I learned in church--that Jesus loved everyone the same, that we were supposed to love everyone the same as He did--just didn't appear to be happening in day-to-day life.
I arrived a few days late in the dog days of a hot Washington, DC, summer, disappointing my brother, as my due date had been the 4th, and he'd drawn a picture of me "shooting out like a firecracker," as he wrote in the caption.
The year's events demonstrate the transition in our nation from the innocent and prosperous (for white people) 1950's to the next decade, during which society would be turned upside down by a bunch of white college students rebelling against the values of their parents (my sister included) and the unrest and protest of those "other" Americans--the ones who'd lived at the margins of society since merchants sold them into slavery and, despite Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, had never really been freed.
But what did I know of that? My family lived in a post-war, solidly built brick Cape Cod in a neighborhood of nearly identical such homes, each with the dappled trunk of a sycamore stretching ever higher into the sky, dropping spiky seedballs into the grass below for children's bare feet to painfully land on.
Those were the worries I had as a child--not whether my mother could pay the heating bill, or whether the lights could be turned on at night, as one of my students would write many years later when I assigned an essay in which they were to describe a difficult time in their lives.
Things just weren't adding up.
What I learned in church--that Jesus loved everyone the same, that we were supposed to love everyone the same as He did--just didn't appear to be happening in day-to-day life.
I arrived a few days late in the dog days of a hot Washington, DC, summer, disappointing my brother, as my due date had been the 4th, and he'd drawn a picture of me "shooting out like a firecracker," as he wrote in the caption.
The year's events demonstrate the transition in our nation from the innocent and prosperous (for white people) 1950's to the next decade, during which society would be turned upside down by a bunch of white college students rebelling against the values of their parents (my sister included) and the unrest and protest of those "other" Americans--the ones who'd lived at the margins of society since merchants sold them into slavery and, despite Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, had never really been freed.
But what did I know of that? My family lived in a post-war, solidly built brick Cape Cod in a neighborhood of nearly identical such homes, each with the dappled trunk of a sycamore stretching ever higher into the sky, dropping spiky seedballs into the grass below for children's bare feet to painfully land on.
Those were the worries I had as a child--not whether my mother could pay the heating bill, or whether the lights could be turned on at night, as one of my students would write many years later when I assigned an essay in which they were to describe a difficult time in their lives.
