The Black-White binary of race has never been as permanent or fixed as people like to claim, not when you live up real close. Of course shared ways grew. Take, for example, a few women who sat in different places along the color line, from deep in the Mountain South. Doris Payne, a native of Slab Fork, West Virginia, is a striking and elegant elderly Black woman known as an international jewel thief. As her lore goes, she was a child in a jewelry store, giddy because her father had told her she could purchase a watch as a gift. But then the store owner, seeing White patrons enter, ushered her
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