Upbeat or downbeat?

When I was growing up there were African American people all around us.  They babysat for my parents, did our ironing, drove my grandfather around, cooked at the restaurant.  None of us considered ourselves racist.  We loved "our colored folks."

We'd drive half an hour to their neighborhoods to pick them up so they could do these things for us.  We found the music emanating from their church windows exotic and passionate.

I am from the North which seems like it would never have been called that if there hadn't been a South.  The North prides itself on being non-racist.

When I went to college in 1967, my roommate and I discovered just how nondiscriminatory the world really was.  I went to a  small northern college and lived in a dormitory where you had to fill out form before school began saying whether you would room with a person who smoked, or was colored.  My roommate was an honor student from a small Catholic school near where I grew up.  We got along great.

We enjoyed many of the same television programs and authors.  We both loved the color red.  Our taste in music was similar, but our dancing was different.  She explained that I danced on the downbeat and she on the upbeat, but in the end it turned out that no matter what we did . . . if we did it together, we had to do it alone.

Just the two of us was fine, but the world wasn't ready for us together.  I'd like to say it was because we were real characters, but it was only because our skins were different colors. 

Sometimes when I step away and look back I realize what an odd world I lived in.