High Price Read Online Free PDF

would ultimately do so for weeks at a time sporadically throughout my childhood—we felt like she would sometimes take her frustration out on us. For example, her children received preferential treatment. If there was a fight or dispute with our cousins, we rarely got the benefit of the doubt. My sister Joyce described feeling like Cinderella when she lived there, with a wicked stepmother and treacherous stepsisters. Even though some of the ways that Weezy treated us were undoubtedly driven by lack of money and being overwhelmed, that isn’t something that children can understand. All we saw was that we were not wanted.
    Then there was my maternal grandmother’s place. At any given time, at least six grandchildren were staying in Grandmama’s Hollywood, Florida, residence, sleeping on thick blankets on the floor. My mom wasn’t the only one of her three full sisters to rely on her mother for long-term child care—but she certainly did it frequently. I’ve already mentioned that my oldest sister, Jackie, lived with my grandmother. My brother Gary, who was only seventeen months younger than me, also had a permanent home there. He was sent off to Grandmama’s even before my parents divorced. Though I was used to sharing my space with a half-dozen or more kids, her house didn’t feel like home to me; I didn’t feel welcomed. In fact, I was far from her favorite grandchild.
    Instead, I experienced some distinct hostility from my maternal grandmother. She was a tough countrywoman who had been raised on a farm in Eutawville, South Carolina. My mother grew up there, too, deep in one of the most rural areas of the South. My grandmother and grandfather had packed up their family and moved to Florida in 1957, just before my mom turned seventeen. That was five years after Willie-Lee, my mother’s then-fifteen-year-old brother, was kicked to death by a mule. My grandmother just couldn’t take farm life anymore. Still, she’d spent virtually all of her life before that working the fields and facing the prejudice from both whites and blacks that comes from having dark skin, blackened even further by work in the sun. A big woman, five foot eleven and heavy, she kept her long, graying hair in two braids. Her natural skin tone was the same deep brown as mine.
    While Grandmama always made sure we had a place to stay, some of my most vivid memories center on her telling me that I was just like my father. Like him, she said, I was ill-mannered, stubborn, selfish, and rude. Like him, she repeated, I’d never amount to anything. Looking back, it’s hardly surprising that a mother would see the man who beat her daughter and ultimately abandoned her with eight young children as a bad guy. I couldn’t see that, though, as a child. I just felt her rejection of me. Much as I tried to deny it, it hurt.
    And what I also sensed was that Grandmama—like most of white America and, sadly, some blacks—seemed to link my father’s bad behavior with his blackness. Someone as dark as him could never have been good enough for her daughter, she felt, even though her own skin was dark. Her Mary could do better. Since my skin was black like my father’s, that literally colored our relationship.
    Much has been written about how racism often makes its victims into perpetrators, how it is impossible to live in a world that hates people with your skin tone and not have this seep into your own dealings with black and white. When I later read Nietzsche’s line that “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” I knew exactly what he meant. Battling twisted prejudices can twist and distort you, often without your awareness of it. Throughout my early childhood, I saw over and over how my grandmother favored the lighter-skinned children: praising them, while punishing or ignoring the dark ones. The conditioning was insidious.
    It’s not clear to me that she was conscious of this behavior, but it surely