I'm Color-Blind!

I suppose many of life's lessons are learned in Kindergarten but some are learned much earlier. There was a summer when I was small. I couldn't have been older than three, almost four. I was playing in the front yard of the old house on third east. My grandma was sitting on the front steps watching me. I can remember the warm sun on my bare shoulders. I was wearing a sundress with ruffles on the shoulders and a tie in the back.

A man walked by. Now that isn't too remarkable. It was a small town then, Provo, but there were people walking by at times and we did live close to a busy street. No, what was unusual was that this was the first black man I had ever seen. He looked giant-tall to me as I sat in the grass and he was so dark.

With three-year-old tact I yelled, “Look Grandma! Look at the dirty man!” Suddenly I was moved from the front walk to the porch as fast as lightening. But, Grandma wasn't angry she just told me some things that have stayed with me forever.

She told me that people all over the world look different in different ways. It doesn't matter what they look like so much as what's inside. Then she told me about herself. She was a little girl in Tennessee and she had a black mammy to look after her. She loved her mammy tremendously! Her mammy was always fussin' over her and washin' her up. One time she was so frustrated with all the fussin' and washin' she told her mammy to wash all that black off herself first and leave her alone. Her mammy laughed and laughed a long time about that and Grandma said she later learned what a silly thing it was to say because that woman was the “cleanest” woman she had ever known in her entire life.

Grandma made sure I remembered to “never pay no mind to what a person's skin color is. It's the inside that makes us human.” As a result, I grew up in the 50's and 60's out of step with the nation because I didn't understand segregation or why any of it was a problem. I still don't understand such thinking. I still don't see people as different. I may not have grown up with many blacks around but there were Mexicans and Pacific Islanders. They are all wonderful people to me. And, it's all Grandma's fault.