High Price

that my oldest sister, Jackie, lived with my grandmother. My brother Gary, who was only seventeen months younger than me, also had a permanent home there. He was sent off to Grandmama’s even before my parents divorced. Though I was used to sharing my space with a half-dozen or more kids, her house didn’t feel like home to me; I didn’t feel welcomed. In fact, I was far from her favorite grandchild.
    Instead, I experienced some distinct hostility from my maternal grandmother. She was a tough countrywoman who had been raised on a farm in Eutawville, South Carolina. My mother grew up there, too, deep in one of the most rural areas of the South. My grandmother and grandfather had packed up their family and moved to Florida in 1957, just before my mom turned seventeen. That was five years after Willie-Lee, my mother’s then-fifteen-year-old brother, was kicked to death by a mule. My grandmother just couldn’t take farm life anymore. Still, she’d spent virtually all of her life before that working the fields and facing the prejudice from both whites and blacks that comes from having dark skin, blackened even further by work in the sun. A big woman, five foot eleven and heavy, she kept her long, graying hair in two braids. Her natural skin tone was the same deep brown as mine.
    While Grandmama always made sure we had a place to stay, some of my most vivid memories center on her telling me that I was just like my father. Like him, she said, I was ill-mannered, stubborn, selfish, and rude. Like him, she repeated, I’d never amount to anything. Looking back, it’s hardly surprising that a mother would see the man who beat her daughter and ultimately abandoned her with eight young children as a bad guy. I couldn’t see that, though, as a child. I just felt her rejection of me. Much as I tried to deny it, it hurt.
    And what I also sensed was that Grandmama—like most of white America and, sadly, some blacks—seemed to link my father’s bad behavior with his blackness. Someone as dark as him could never have been good enough for her daughter, she felt, even though her own skin was dark. Her Mary could do better. Since my skin was black like my father’s, that literally colored our relationship.
    Much has been written about how racism often makes its victims into perpetrators, how it is impossible to live in a world that hates people with your skin tone and not have this seep into your own dealings with black and white. When I later read Nietzsche’s line that “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” I knew exactly what he meant. Battling twisted prejudices can twist and distort you, often without your awareness of it. Throughout my early childhood, I saw over and over how my grandmother favored the lighter-skinned children: praising them, while punishing or ignoring the dark ones. The conditioning was insidious.
    It’s not clear to me that she was conscious of this behavior, but it surely reflected the way she had been treated. We were all molded by these attitudes and behaviors before we could even name them. As I’m sure is true for my grandmother as well, I can’t even describe my own earliest experiences of racism—it was so pervasive that it’s like trying to recall how you learned to speak. You know there was a time before you had language, but it’s impossible to remember or to delineate particular incidents or to know what it was like to not know.
    Nonetheless, when I sat down with my sister Beverly to research this book, she showed me just how deep it went. In my family, Beverly and I have the darkest skin—and there was nothing subtle about the way the darker children were treated in my grandmother’s home. They called us “blackie” or “darkie.” Sometimes Beverly was “teased” that way even at home. I would always shrug it off but the tears in Beverly’s eyes as she recalled those words made me realize how much it had hurt everyone. Our behavior is shaped over time by sequences and patterns of reinforcers and punishers, often without much conscious awareness on our part of how we are being affected. Even racist behavior is learned this way.
    For most of my early childhood, however, I myself had little direct experience with white people, since I was growing up in a black neighborhood that they rarely visited. But I did see how the children of the people my mom worked for casually called her by her first name—a way we would