Free Certain People by Stephen; Birmingham Page A

there was no place for her to live except with a white family, where she had been asked to help out as a baby-sitter. Because this meant “working for whites,” Lydia Wright wrote to Grandmother Hickman for advice. Her grandmother replied, “Any work, as long as it’s honorable work, is all right—as long as it helps you go through school.”
    Lina, her sister, and two brothers all graduated from Walnut Hills High School, Cincinnati’s public high school for gifted children. “My mother and grandmother always told us we were superior—we were the best, and the brightest. We had to be, and we were .” Even at Walnut Hills, though, the Wright family detected racial slights, either real or imagined—such as the fact that black children were assigned to use the swimming pool during the last period on Fridays, just before the pool was emptied for the weekend. Lina Fleming herself graduated from Fisk University, and her brothers and sisters are all college graduates. “There are twenty-eight college degrees in my immediate family—and nine Ph.D.’s!
    â€œMy family would compare with any upper-class family, white or Negro,” she says. “And I’d have to say we’d come out better than most whites. My brother Nathan’s first wife was a Cardoza—there’s old Jewish blood there, the best Jewish blood. My brother Hickman was an executive with Ebony , but he couldn’t get along with the first vice president. So he left, and went as an executive with Clairol. Later, the man who was first vice president left, and Hickman was asked back to Ebony to replace the man he couldn’t get along with! Now Hickman is second in command! My brother Nathan was an Episcopal minister, but he left the church when he got his divorce. Now Nathan teaches at the State College of Albany—sociology and Black Studies. He’s married again, to a white girl. We weren’t too happy about that. She could have been hostile, but she was nice.When I met her, I said, ‘Well, now you’re in the family, I suppose we’ll have to be friends.’ We are, more or less. Her name was Carolyn May—she’s related to that Mr. May who was married to Marjorie Merriweather Post. She’s from an old Philadelphia family, related to Longfellow—she’s a D.A.R. and in the Social Register . Let’s see if they drop her for marrying Nathan! She’s all right. They live in a big house in Selkirk, New York, with thirteen acres and eight acres of lawn—an old mansion they fixed up, full of antiques. They have a couple—a white couple—that keeps house for them. My daughter Diana went to St. Anne’s Academy in Arlington, Massachusetts, and from there to Western College for Women, in Oxford, Ohio, which is now a part of Miami University. My niece, Debbie Wright, went to Yale, and was senior class orator in 1973. Another niece, Patty, speaks five languages. Another niece is in a training program at the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York. The other day, she had lunch with David Rockefeller. My sister Lydia is quite rich. She’s probably the richest of us all. She made a lot of money in the stock market. She has a huge house in Buffalo, full of museum-quality antiques and beautiful paintings—but not showy , like some of those other, those trashy people. I mean, my family is distinguished . White people may not know it, but we know it—we’re superior.”
    And yes, Lina Wright Fleming admits, she has her own firm set of prejudices. “I’m prejudiced against Catholics,” she says, “and I’m prejudiced against WASPs, and I’m prejudiced against some of my fellow blacks. I mean Negroes. It’s those people in the ghettoes who say ‘black.’ We say ‘Negro’—people like us.”

6
    Roots
    In the middle part of the 1800s, near the little town of effingham, Illinois, a small community