Reply #22: Several years ago, I was in Natchez for a convention... [View All]

[Hepburn]

...and my friend and I, both from Calif, went to a mall. When I was looking in a store window at some fabulous shoes and I commented to the lady standing next to me about these very high styled shoes. (I admit it ~~ I am a shoe-aholic.) I am white, she was black. She looked at me and said, "You are not from around here, are you?" My reply was something about my lack of Southern accent being a dead give away...and then it dawned on me what she meant: I was white and I was talking to her. She was not the least bit nasty about it...just stating a fact to me.

I realized that I had felt something "off" the entire time I had been in that mall. It was after school...and I did not see one bit of intermixing, exchanges, etc., between the groups of white students and black student who were streaming into the mall. In the food court, most of the booths had at least one white and one black person at the counter and...son of a gun...yep, you know who waited on who. With the conversation with the other woman standing at the shoe store window...it finally dawned on me what really had given me that odd sensation to being with. I had gone into one of those fast food places to get a soft drink and I, a white person, got in the black line and ordered and paid for my drink.

Natchez, Miss, was ENTIRELY segregated. I kept looking around after that at different places I went, and sure enough, blacks and whites simply did not mix socially or in any other manner.

I gotta tell you...this was a real shock to me. Now this happened about ten years ago ~~ in the mid-1990s ~~ I have no clue if it is still like this, but I cannot imagine that ugly attitude totally going away in 10 years.