Hi, Janet!! I just got the Mercedes yesterday, and since it is a very much older car, it needs to be driven gently. I think I will just motor around town for a few day before I go anywhere exciting. The problem with that, of course, is that it wants to go a hundred miles an hour all the time!! I can just feel it begging to accelerate away from all the stalled traffic, and its humdrum, stop-and-go urban existence.
A trip to Napa (the wineries and the quaint oldtown area, not the state mental hospital) was mentioned for a Sunday drive. There is apparently an antique store there that a friend of my husband's told him about, with wonderful art for sale. I really enjoy getting out of town on Sundays!!
Okay, what I observed about race relations in the south is all from a trip to Texas, which admittedly just borders the deep south. What I saw were black and brown people who were very subservient, very much overly polite and almost reverential in their social and business intercourse with whites. San Francisco is very different from that, in that while I am sure there is some racism, everyone works together in the same offices and stores, with no particular stratified pecking order based on color. The black middle class here is large; and the school district has recently created several high schools in mostly underprivileged black areas which have uniforms, counseling, a computer for each child to take home, and required participation by parents, to work them into ways of nurturing their children for success in the larger world. It seems there is a huge attempt in general to break defeatist patterns of behavior in constructive ways. The black people here that I know are way cool, with the best outfits and an inherent sense of style and pizazz. At a McDonald's in San Francisco, anyone could be behind the counter. In Texas, I saw almost exclusively minorities.
A black coworker who just returned from Louisiana sensed the same, more rigid stratification that I felt in Texas. One of the most interesting things I have read recently is that there is a strong reverse migration--blacks returning to the south, after so many of them moved north to work in wartime industries in the 1940's. And of course there are a lot of southern cities with black mayors.
The woman who moved back to the south with her biracial daughter--what did she have to say? What was her situation? |
