Thread by @JJ9828

I want you guys to understand how close we are to slavery and reconstruction. It's a little bit of a story. My mama is in her early 60s. She grew up on a farm in Central Missouri in a county that was populated more by slaves than white people at the beginning of the Civil War.

My family farm never had slaves because my grandfather during that time was an abolitionist. However, during reconstruction, we had a lot of sharecroppers. A lot. And when my mother was very small, she remembers my grandmother feeding them lunch every day.

They were not allowed to come into the house. My grandmother would cook a lot of food but they had to eat out in the backyard. In other words, Black sharecroppers couldn't sit at the same table with my grandmother's white children.

My mama was small enough that she just wander around the backyard in her saggy diaper and later her little skirts. She remembers the sharecroppers looking after her and making sure she didn't wander off too far. One old man in particular always called her Missy Lori or just Missy

So my mama finally started asking why he didn't just call her Lori because that was her name. He said, "Oh no, Missy. Wouldn't be right." She never once got any of those sharecroppers to address her in a non-enslaved tone.

So can you see how close we are to very old damage in America? My mother is a living breathing human being who remembers the grandchildren of slaves and the way they spoke to her as a toddler as if she was above them. She never understood.