In 1963 I was fifteen and living a bucolic existence in the farmlands of southern New Jersey, plunging into every activity high school could invent. Abruptly my father was transferred to Birmingham, Alabama. I jetted overnight into a world completely foreign. Teenagers I met drove cars, not bicycles, had cotillions instead of sock hops. We could barely understand each other’s dialects.

But such differences were only superficial; the real trouble lay much deeper. The Old South and the civil rights movement were fighting a duel to the death. As we arrived, a black church was bombed and children killed. The Commissioner of Public Safety, Bull Conner, turned fire hoses on peaceful demonstrators. I was bewildered to see BLACK and WHITE signs everywhere, even on opposite sides of the same drinking fountain.

As a Yankee, I received threatening calls at home, and trash was thrown onto our lawn. In algebra class, students sitting behind me burned me with matches. In November, President Kennedy was assassinated, and at school that day the relief was undisguised.

I went to see my guidance counselor. “I just want to fit in, to belong,” I wailed, echoing (without hearing myself) the larger national issue.

“Well, dear,” she explained, “these children were all born here. They know what the others eat for breakfast. They have family silver buried in the back yard.” (She was referring to the Southern practice of saving their possessions from Union looters by burying them.)

I left the guidance office in tears, feeling that what had been buried was the confident kid I had once been. I could no more create an appropriate family on the spot than a person could change the color of his flesh.

Finally came graduation. An ecstatic administration had secured Gov. George C. Wallace as the keynote speaker. Seven hundred of us, carefully dressed and perfectly behaved, crowded the platform. It was sweltering. The governor spoke of a “sinister movement that would reshape this nation. … When you go to college, there will be young men and women who will tell you that we must put human rights before property rights. …” He warned us that wherever property rights have been ignored, human rights have vanished. He closed his speech shouting about civil rights and communism; the crowd applauded. His raw emotion upset me, but now we all had to line up, shake his hand, and accept a three-by-five-inch photograph he had autographed. The stage lights burned hot; people pressed; it was my turn. He handed me his picture. I looked into his eyes, which were very black and not at all smiling. Suddenly I couldn’t stand it. I held the picture up to him, tore it in two, dropped the pieces to the platform, and walked trembling down the stairs.

During my college years, my father was transferred back to New Jersey, and we went home. As my life