Nobody presents you with a handbook when you’re teething and says, “Here’s how you must behave as a second-class citizen.” Instead, the humiliating expectations and traditions of segregation creep over you, slowly stealing a teaspoonful of your self-esteem each day. BY the time I was three years old, I was already so afraid of white people that when my red-haired, white-skinned cousin, Brenda, came to babysit, I hid beneath Mother’s bed. Like many nonwhite Southern families, ours included people with a variety of skin tones and physical features. Although Daddy’s skin was brown like mine, some of his relatives looked white. My mother was fair-skinned as well, but Brenda’s skin color was made more stark by her flaming red hair. As a toddler, growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1945, I felt safe only in my sepia-toned world, a cocoon of familiar people and places. I knew there were white people living somewhere far away and we didn’t do things together. My folks never explained that I should be frightened of those white people.
