My family's tight budget excluded me from the daily hot lunch sold in the cafeteria; thus, clutching a brown paper sack containing a sandwich, a few cookies and a piece of fruit, each day I went to stand in the "milk only" line. While I waited to exchange my seven cents for a half-pint container of Hillside Farms milk, my mouth watered at the smells that floated from behind the steam counter where cafeteria workers in light green uniforms and loose fitting hair nets shoveled oversized helpings of meat loaf, brown gravy and yellowish-orange globs of macaroni and cheese onto partitioned, stainless steel trays.

On mornings when peanut butter and banana sandwiches were posted as the main lunch entree, most students let out groans. Not me. I craved whatever they served in the cafeteria, mostly because it was what I could not have. Each day after hurriedly eating the bologna sandwich my mother spiced-up with hot sauce, I rushed out of the cafeteria and up a short flight of stairs to a place where I could devour as much as I wanted - free of charge. At the top of the stairs, I pushed open the door to a large rectangular room, the mirror image of the cafeteria below, where instead of tables, rows and rows of evenly spaced honey-colored waist high wooden shelves lined with books of all shapes and sizes marched across the room. Sunlight usually flooded the space through windows that covered three sides if room. At the windowless end, behind a low counter made of the same blond wood as the shelves, stood a woman whose round body and sparkly eyes revealed the satiation that comes with many good meals followed by many good books. I wanted a life just like hers.

At home, our sole bookshelf held a set of World Book Encyclopedias, an unabridged dictionary and a Bible; so on my first visit to the library, I had been overwhelmed by the sight of so many books in one place. I had wandered from shelf to shelf, my neck arched at an awkward angle to read the titles without moving the books from their assigned places. The librarian, whom I came to know as Miss Cuthbert, noticed me and called out that it was okay to take books from the shelves.

She also said that if I got a library card, I could take up to five books home. I had gotten a card that very day, and thereafter, proceeded to spend most of each lunch hour perusing the collection. I devoured the words in those books as greedily as my classmates devoured cherry cobbler from their stainless steel trays.  Mostly, I was interested in other people's lives. Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, Antonia, My Antonia, Sapphira and the Slave Girl were my favorite books. I identified with the foreigners who peopled their pages. I also identified with Superman, who, like me, had been abandoned in an alien place and longed to return home.

I hated my hometown and the concentric circles that prescribed my life there.  The usual restraints that hinder teenage freedom were multiplied by the constraints of my skin color. I seldom rode the public bus that cris-crossed Sumter, South Carolina. I'm not sure whether it was because I didn't have the ten cents fare, or because I hated sitting on the back of the bus. While poverty played a role in my distaste for southern life, even if my family had had ready cash, it would not have changed the things I hated most.

I hated the fear the adults I knew exhibit toward white people. Even white children. "You're a school teacher. Why do you let them talk to you like that?" I once asked my mother.

"Because they're white," she had answered, "and they can do whatever they please."

Armed with lessons newly learned form civics class, I answered, "No they can't! The Bill of Rights says all men are created equal!" Those words brought the sting of my mother's hand across my face. I didn't understand the tears in her eyes.

I interpreted her actions as a sign of disapproval - not a sign of love. I did not realize that she was trying to instill in me the behavior that would insure my survival in a place where colored people's questions and insolence always led to trouble.

After a few more timely blows, issued in response to my verbal indignation, my mother succeeded in making me keep my mouth shut; however, she couldn't make me like the segregation we endured. I was far angrier than a respectable 13 year old should be, and had no way to express it. No one to tell. So, I suffered, and read.

Read, and suffered. Books became my only source of solace and hope. And my flesh expressed my anguish. An itchy, watery rash that covered both hands made me withdraw even further into the books I read. No doctor's prescription or home-brewed concoction could remedy my dis-ease. I wanted to be out of my own skin.

Some days I deviated from my usual path home from school and walked along streets where white families lived. I would stare into their windows, imagining myself living in their fine houses. Imagine myself as a little white girl sitting on the porch swing watching me -- a little colored girl -- walk by. I imagined myself  inviting that little girl in to play.

Once, I pretended to walk up onto the porch, through the front door and into the kitchen where I sat down at the table to share a waiting snack of milk and cookies with the children of the house and their mother.

A child's voice broke my reverie. "What are you staring at, stupid. You better git away from here before I sic my dog on you." I stuck my tongue out at the blond haired little girl, then turned and ran home. 

Because I had read about them in books, I knew there were places where people were respected for who they were, not the color of their skin. I vowed that as soon as I was old enough, I would find such a place.

I selected a college north of the Mason-Dixon line and rejoiced when, at 17, I departed Sumter for the freedom of life in Baltimore, Maryland.