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“But what are you going to say when she asks you about it?” I asked. Lizzie cleared her throat. “Miss Watson, dat sum conebread lak I neva before et.” “Try ‘dat be,’ ” I said. “That would be the correct incorrect grammar.”
“I reckon she likes money mo’. Mos’ peoples likes money mo’ ’n anythin’ else. White folks, anyways.”
“Help me understand,” I said to Norman. “I’m to look authentically black, but I need the makeup.” “Not exactly. You’re black, but they won’t let you into the auditorium if they know that, so you have to be white under the makeup so that you can look black to the audience.”
There we were, twelve of us, marching down the main street that separated the free side of town from the slave side, ten white men in blackface, one black man passing for white and painted black, and me, a light-brown black man painted black in such a way as to appear like a white man trying to pass for black.
“You might be the reason, but it’s not your fault.”
For a second I wondered whether Norman was in fact black and a slave. Perhaps he was an insane white man who fancied he was black. Unlikely, of course, stranger than most things I could imagine, but not impossible. He had been able to speak slave, but it was possible a crazy white man could have learned it. Then it hit me that it didn’t make any difference whether he was white or black, and what did that mean, anyway?