What if I’d told that drawing room tea party: “Sidonie likes the bookstore too, because nobody gives her a hard time there. White girls don’t spill ink all over her dress at the bookstore, and colored boys don’t twist her arm behind her back, and nobody stands in her way just leering like crazy when all she wants to do is walk down the corridor. That’s the kind of girl that exists out there, less than a mile away from those linen curtains. But if you saw her without talking to her, she’d make you paranoid in a way that only a colored girl can make a white woman paranoid.
