This "Ten Best Days" project is more then meets the eye. I am enjoying thinking about candidates for the ten best days. It's strange that the best days aren't always the days you plan to be the best days.

Here's one, maybe.

We had just moved over here to the Deep South from Texas. I like Texas. Texas makes sense to me. If I chose to live outside of Texas it would be towards the Southwest ... sure, I love visiting Chicago, New York, DC ... even Atlanta and Chattanooga are super cool. If I were to choose where to spend a significant portion of my life, it woulda never ever ever been in a small town in the Southern portion of the United States.

There were two grocery stores here when we first arrived. One was frequented by a predominantly black clientele ... the other, you got it, mostly by the local white population. There were no black folks at churches we visited ... no black families living in the neighborhoods where we were shown homes (What about this home I remember asking ... no, you wouldn't want to live there the realtor replied ... she's showing me homes that back up to the Interstate, but she knows I wouldn't want to live there!?!) ... the signs I remembered seeing in the pages of LIFE magazine were down, but in the early 1990's the signs were still everywhere.
I was standing in the grocery store trying to figure out which aisle for what ... reading the signs ... and I became aware of a black woman staring at me. She was probably about my age. (I found out later that the black people who are roughly my age wouldn't have been my classmates had I attended High School over here ... segregation was still in full swing over here ... it absolutely amazed me. Don't get me wrong ... I'm sure there is plenty of prejudice to go around in Texas, but that type of hatred wasn't institutionalized.) "Wow, she is a tall woman" I remember thinking. I'm five foot nine and so I don't get to think that very often. She was getting ready to look away when I smiled at her ... and she smiled back, one of those huge smiles that feels like a hug. "You are really tall." I said to her and she laughed and said, "Too bad that don't help me read." We talked for a while. I wondered how she got along finding things ... shopping ... cooking ... just knowing about stuff. And she took time to tell me. Shopping was easy, because even the canned items had pictures of what was inside the package. (I hadn't thought of that before.) Boxed items were tricky, because the picture might show pancakes, but when you opened the box all you had was a bunch of flour and directions that you couldn't read.
The worst part for her, she told me, was the paying ... she would approach the cashier with out having any idea of what it would cost. She said she knew how much money she had, but no estimate of how much the stuff in her cart would cost. Plus she never really knew if she was being cheated at the check out or not. She couldn't read and she couldn't do simple math in her head. I still notice older black women holding back a few items in their carts while they wait for a sub total ... they are embarrassed to hold up the line.
The lady at the store that day needed some help with reading something and she was looking at me trying to figure out if she could ask me for help. I asked her why she decided to tell me all about this and she said I could tell by looking at you that you were not from around here.

Not from around here. That has been a burning issue for me pretty much from the get go. No body wanted to play with the new girl ... . My Dad's work traveled us all over the country (mostly the Southwest) for enough years to make an impression. When Momma said no more, they chose Houston, where there was a huge concentration of their families and then later, South Texas. There were a lot advantages to moving around ... seems like the one big disadvantage was that I never felt that sense of belonging that the security of a place gives you. There are many pros and cons that come with being not from around here.

We've been here for almost twenty years now. I've witnessed many subtle changes in the social climate. Everyone can still tell that I am not from around here, but it doesn't bother me at all (most of the time). That was a really good day when someone shared a little bit of her life experience with me ... it was really good that she could identify that I wasn't from around here, and therefore may be open to helping her carry her burden, if just for a moment or two.