At the resthome, the one resident who's a retired college professor remembers going from New York to Florida to go visit family back in the 1950s, and the train that she boarded in Manhattan was segregated.
When she got to Florida, her uncle wasn't there yet to go pick her up, and she saw a water fountain sign that said "Colored," and she assumed that it meant that the water was colored and so she really wanted to try it, and when she went to go do that, this conductor who had taken her under his wing until her relatives arrived saw that and got all worked up and tried to intervene with her and stop her from drinking the water.
And, her uncle and his second wife ran a restaurant where (white) people could sit and eat but (black) people could only get takeout from this window on the side of the building, and she asked them why they did that, and her aunt said that that was just the way they did things down there.
After getting back from that vacation, then, she wrote a school essay, "Why the United States is Not a Democracy."
"Wow," I was like. "And how old were you?"
"Thirteen," she was like.
"So why did you think that the water was colored water?", I was like. "That seems kind of naive."
"It was," she was like, "But how should I know? My school at home was mixed white and black, we all drank out of the same water fountains, why would I ever think that they separated something like that?"
"Hmm," I was like.
And then, I was like, "That really is a mature essay for a thirteen year-old to write, where do you think you got that?".
"In Hebrew school," she was like, and she said that it was the 1950s and they did a lot of Holocaust education about how Jews were treated in countries in Europe.
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