The Legs Are the Last to Go by Diahann Carroll

to find just the right thing, but even when I was hungry or tired on our shopping expeditions, I was never impatient. I marveled at my mother’s resolve, the fact that she knew so much about fabrics, and knew exactly what she’d have the seamstress do with it.
    â€œGathered here, and with a sash to tie in a bow in the back,” she’d say. “We need a Peter Pan collar and pleats down the front, but not too many.” Her voice was lusty, her accent more rural Southern than Harlem. At times, she seemed like Sophia Loren.
    Sometimes she’d take me to Macy’s, and it felt like I was seeing the world with her as my tour guide. When she’d put a yellow bow in my hair, she’d fuss with it until it was just so. “Here, not there,” she’d say as her strong fingers fluttered over my head like bees pollinating a flower. “Just off to the side so it doesn’t distract too much from your eyes.”
    She was of the generation that had just come North from the South. And they were obsessed with looking clean and attractively dressed because we lived in a country that promoted the idea that blacks were neither. If you talk about racism, it all began to gel for me when I realized why my mother was so obsessed with cleanliness. Well, she always knew what she wanted. I guess she was like her mother in that way. My grandmother Rebecca was quite sharp, a formidable person. She was also incredibly proper, a hardworking country woman who ran a cotton and tobacco farm. She saw to it that my mother was educated, the first girl in her North Carolina town to be sent off to high school the next town over—a very big deal in the early twentieth century. I don’t think there were many women who would actually run their own businesses atthe time, and certainly not many black women. I still remember when I’d stay with her as an older child during my summer vacations, and going to town and observing how she conducted herself. The South was not like the North in the 1940s. When we went shopping, I remember hating the way white men did business with my grandmother, when she was selling them hogs or chickens. Instead of Rebecca, they called her Becky, and spoke to her as if she was a child. But she would not respond, she just stood her ground until her business was done. I learned something from her quiet dignity in the presence of racism. “Thank you, Mr. Smith,” she’d say, without any tone of annoyance in her voice. “I’ll see you next week.” It was difficult to watch, in one way, but impressive in another. Studied composure helped her get along in her world. It wasn’t easy being a woman running a farm. But my grandfather, who died when he stepped on an electrical wire, had left her his business and she had to run it with an iron hand, employing local blacks and treating them no better or worse than her white counterparts did. She would have them picked up for work each day in a mule-drawn wagon, rather than a truck. That’s how long ago it was. And when her workers lined up to get their pay at the end of the day, they had their cotton bags full on their shoulders, and she weighed them very carefully to determine exactly what they were to be paid. Once she decided, there was no arguing with Miz Rebecca, as they called her. She was a fair boss, but tough. And she would not allow me in the fields to work, absolutely not.
    I spent many happy summers on the porch of her bighouse, listening to the crickets and honeybees, looking out at all the children who were working, and hearing the screen door slam as the family came and went from the kitchen. I had to dress every morning and, after breakfast, sit on that porch in an ironed cotton dress, ramrod straight, with hands folded politely. It was hot in all those clothes, but my mother and grandmother were far too formal to consider changing the way a child should dress merely for comfort.
    There was only one