Well...after I think about I guess I know how nigger came to be exclusively aligned with black folk. My old man forbade us from uttering the word when we were kids. One time, he was driving his mother home and my grandmother said something about a black person and called them a nigger. He told my Grandmother not to ever say that word around his kids or he would stop letting her be around us. Grannies retort was, well Son, what would you have me call them. Dad said, call them Negros if for some reason you can't just learn their names and call them by their name. She must not have liked that and never fully capitulated...but from then on out called them nigra's.

My grandmother referred to all black folk as niggers. She taught black kids and at the time always paid a black lady to help her keep the house up and cook. I never saw her treat the old black ladies that she would hire in a demeaning manner and from what I saw, I think she actually liked them. Never the less, she would call them niggers before Dad laid down the law.

My Granny came from the backwoods of Kentucky and lived out the mid to latter part of her life in bum-pump Tennessee...I guess that's the way she was raised or grew up around. So, maybe the low class whites calling all blacks niggers just because they were black would attach the word to only blacks.

I guess the two things in my life that had a profound effect on me, concerning race, was when I saw a whites only water fountain and when we went to granny's house for thanksgiving dinner. One of the old black ladies had cooked us up a really good Thanksgiving dinner. We all sat down to eat and notice she wasn't acting like she was going to join us...we asked her to join us. Dad even pulled up a chair for her. No amount of asking would change her mind. She fixed her a plate of food and went out to the back porch to eat!!!

Went to the back porch to eat!!

Bet none of ya'll ever saw anything like that.

Seeing that whites only water fountain never sat well with me. Even being only about 7 years old, that struck me as wrong.

But the old woman eating on the back porch...that hurt my heart.