No matter how much she kept sweeping the floors, the dust just wouldn’t go away. She knew that she needed to get this done before her four sisters and brother woke up from their nap and she had to feed them their lunch. They weren’t really her sisters; they were her first cousins. But they called each other “sister.” They were the children of two sisters, who nearly looked like twins.
She was the oldest of them and they teased her about her red hair and being bossy. It was true, she didn’t look like the rest of her family who had dark mocha-colored skin and woolly black hair. She was light-skinned, easily mistaken for being white by some and her red hair and light brown eyes, truly made her stand out in an otherwise Black world.
“Mama, who was that man?”
She had asked that question of her mother many times when they visited the Woolworth on King Street when she was a little girl. He was a handsome white man with slick black hair and a well-manicured mustache, who always gave her a dime and ice cream when she visited. He would smile brightly when he saw her, and her mother and his family would look on with less excitement. At least that’s how she noticed it. On those rare weekends when she got to visit Charleston she would marvel at the shiny cars that drove up and down the street and dreamed of one day having her own fancy car that she would drive to go shopping to buy gifts for all of her family.
Her mother would always tell her, “He’s a very nice man.”
And that would be it. The two of them would then walk holding hands and her mother would tell her, “I want you to do something with your life.” And she would just imagine what that “something” would be.
But things were different now.