Not From Around Here?

When my paternal grandmother died in 1969, my father and mother went down to Osceola, Arkansas to fix up my grandmother’s house in preparation of putting it on the market. When they arrived at the house , my mother saw my grandmother’s “colored” cleaning lady. (Please note: in 1969, in Osceola, Arkansas, the *polite* term for a cleaning person of African ancestry was “colored.”) on her hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor. My mother, being the good Kansas farm girl she was, immediately grabbed a rag, dipped it in the water and began scrubbing the other end of the kitchen floor.

My grandmother’s cleaning lady did a double-take, was silent for a while, and then commented, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

That story has always made me very proud of my mother.