TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 42/Comment

[Sharon Mack]

Coloured Water

This happened to me only I was just barely 19 years old, newly married to a
soldier stationed at Fort Campbell.  We were in a movie theatre in
Hopkinsville, Kentucky.  I was fresh from a little town, Reisterstown,
Maryland.  While waiting in the lobby for the first show to empty, I went to
get a drink from a tan colored water fountain (I honestly hadn't noticed the
color of the fountain at first-only in retrospect).  The usher screamed at
me, "No!  No! NO!  That there's for the colored folk."

I stopped frightened and looked around.  Everyone was looking at me, so was
my new husband.  It was seconds I'm sure but my eyes caught those of a black
man on his way up to the balcony (I was naive I had no idea he HAD to go up
to the balcony).  I turned and drank my fill at the tan water fountain.
Wiped my mouth with the back of one hand, grabbed my husband's hand with the
other and we left. 

That was only one of many, many incidents I was witness to that made me
ashamed of my color that year.  Then I went home and the battle for civil
rights began.  It was a battle that needed to be fought and I hope it is a
battle that someday will be truly won.

Many years later in 1978 I married a black man.  We never traveled into the
Deep South.  We were warned not to.  He is now dead.  I wonder if we have
progressed passed those warnings.