My people had submitted to life, and dealt with it the best they could. We didn’t question God’s ways. We simply accepted things and swallowed hard. No one asked, for instance, if I were happy as a child. It’s not that they didn’t care; it’s that they didn’t know they could care. We didn’t think we were supposed to be happy. We were Negroes, after all, Colored people who were glad simply to be alive. Feelings were irrelevant. They had to be. There was no time in our stressful lives for emotions.
