Kimberly Williams Crenshaw

So I'm looking around the neighborhood, and I'm seeing this number of houses, and a lot of them don't have chimneys.

So, you know, it started when I was really, really little.

But as I grew older—

the conversation would turn to a neighbor who was called Barefoot Annie.

She was an Italian immigrant and was pretty much, I guess from her perspective, left behind as the neighborhood transitioned from an all-white neighborhood to a largely black one.

And when we rode by on our bicycles, she would call us names.

She would use the water hoses to spray us.

And I would come home and report this and try to understand what had we done to her that made her so hostile to us.

And these were the kind of ways that, as a child,

I began to understand what and who I was seen to be by people like Barefoot Annie.

And my parents would walk me through or ask me how I thought or how I felt about that.

So it was coming to consciousness with active interrogation and conversation rather than sort of the silent immersion into the racial order that I was born into.

Yes.

And my father was a big man, a former football player, 6'2", gregarious, son of a minister.

I called him the Martin to my mother's Malcolm.

And when he picked up the phone and heard my grandfather tell him what had happened, I mean, he heaved.

He bent forward.

I had never seen him be emotional like that, him being hurt like that.

it signified for me that there was a tragedy that had occurred, not just to him individually or us as a family, but to a bigger group of us.

I call it the we throughout the book.