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My sister and I lived with our grandmother for most of our young years. We never thought about the color of a person's skin, We didn't know what racism was. Now isn't that strange? At a time when racism was everywhere, it didn't exist in our little world. But all that changed.
We had one theater in our small town, one night a live stage show was performing. The girls in the audience were screaming, some were crying as the the rock and roll singer jerked his hips and shook all over. We got in free that night, our uncle, the usher took us. This was the most exciting thing we had ever experenced. Some young men came in and sat in a row of seats across from us, our uncle shines his flash light toward them and politely tells them "no niggers allowed in the balcony." Now why did I feel so guilty? because even at that young age, I knew it was wrong. Those young men paid to get in, we hadn't even done that, but here we were sitting in the balcony and they couldn't.

My sister and I moved back with our mother. At this time she was living in Chicago, we never lived anywhere long enough to make friends. I remember once, we only went to our new school two weeks before we moved again. At the time I write about, we were living in a pretty rough neighborhood, there always seem to be a fight after school. Someone would yell "FIGHT, FIGHT," everyone would run to watch. As I sood far away from the fight, a girl began to talk to me, "I don't want to watch some dumb ol fight, do you?" I moved my head from side to side, telling her, no, I didn't want to watch a dumb ol fight either. Then she offered me a piece of the candy she was eating, "want some?" Did she know I was white? Did she know we were not suppose to be together? "Do you know what color you are?" I ask. She smiled this beautiful, friendly smile and told me that yes, she knew.
Her name was Pamela, she became my best friend. I will never in a hundred years forget her.
She would come to my house after school, we would scrape for pennies so we could run to the conner store and buy a lemon for a nickle, we'd half that sour thing and suck the juice out.
Pamela would come in the mornings and wait for me outside so we could walk to school together, one morning my mother saw her and ask her to come in and have breakfast with us, that began our breakfast club. When the day would end and we went our seperate way, we would always say, "see

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