Her mother, Ramah Willis Wofford, sang in the church choir, reasoned with the bill collectors, and, when the family was on relief and received bug-ridden meal, wrote a long letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Her parents disagreed, Morrison recalls, about "whether it was possible for white people to improve." Her father thought not. Thus, "distrusting every word and every gesture of every white man on earth, [he] assumed that the white man who crept up the stairs one afternoon had come to molest his daughters and threw him down the stairs and then our tricycle after him." Her mother, on the other hand, believed in white people's possibilities. But both acted from the assumption that "black people were the humans of the globe," and both "had serious doubts about the quality and existence of white humanity." Thus they believed and taught their children that "all succor and aid came from themselves and their neighborhood."
The neighborhood of the imagination, however, stretched from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park to the supernatural.
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