“So we are talking about cultural things, so I will tell you about it. I grew up in a very white culture, my school was  almost entirely white. Not only white, but it was like.. Maybe there was one token Jew, maybe one token black kid .. .I don’t think we had any Asian kids.., very homogeneous. When I was young.. .My father was from Virginia which was very different ..from Delaware .  It was like 4 hours apart, but like worlds apart culturally. Because where I grew up was technically, the North, and where my Dad was  from was the  South. The first time I noticed cultural differences between people was when we would go to Virginia to visit Dad’s family. And his parents had  3  (I don’t know which words to use for them-Black?..I mean, they are African-Americans now, but then they were  Black..) people who worked for them. It was very different , we wouldn’t have had had that in Delaware. But..So they worked for my grandparents and they lived in a very tiny house, in back of my grandparents’  house. I never thought much about it. It was just where they lived but if I saw it now, I would be shocked. There were three, no there were  four of them. So there was Mamie, who was the Mom, Otis was the Dad, and they were probably in their sixties. And then Lizzy, who was a single mother, and William, who was her son. And, anyway.. So they were the first African-American I ever knew.

And I think it was..And I don’t know why I adored them but I could see that they were really different. At first, I mean obviously, they looked different. I noticed that these particular people.. But the old guy, he was nasty, he didn’t like white people. And I don’t think his wife did. They.. probably none of them did. Probably. But they couldn’t say it. But I was a very young kid, I kinda felt that. But Lizzy, who was maybe, in her thirties, and her son William were really warm to us. And I just adored them and when I went to see my grandparents who were very cold people, I would race right back to the kitchen where these people worked, and truly, they were those people I wanted to see, ..and William was 5 or 6 years older than I was, and .. So there was this cultural difference that I was drawn to, because they were just more earthy. These people, I don’t mean that everybody was but.. Compared to my grandparents, these people, they laughed  a lot. They.. talked to me all the time. So they were the first different people I ever knew. And then ..the Civil Rights Movement just started to happen  at the same time and so..I really believed in the Civil Rights Movement..”

Then Ginna talked about her grandmother who used to call Lizzy her “best friend” but Ginna always felt that it sounded artificially. She saw the inequality not only in their living situation, but it was also clearly seen from the manner her Granny talked to Lizzy.

Ginna supported the Civil Right’s movement eagerly, because she believed in it. She was too young that time to know much about the segregation movement, but she was always against any kind of  racism.

Ginna  mentioned the inequalities between white and black people. On one hand, she felt it when African-American people treated her with a particular courtesy that was obviously exaggerated. On the other hand, she also experienced open hostility, “both in looks and comments”, toward white people when living in New-York City. Ginna’s feelings that time were the mixture of understanding and resentment.  She knew that the black people had their reasons to behave like that, but at the same time she felt that it was unfair to be treated in that way, because she personally had never been the one who had slaves or oppressed Black people.

When I asked Ginna about her life during the Cold War, and how she viewed the relationship between the USA and Russia, she first told me about the shelter that her father built in case of war.  Jinna remembers how she loved to play in it with other kids and she was not as scared of the war as her parents were and never hated Russians the way some other Americans did. Ginna did not consider  the conflict between the US and Russia as a cultural one and did not associate it with people, but more with a “chunk of land” that represented the threat to her country.