I am a Southern white working-class woman, and I was a worried child.
For all my young life, I’d been told that it was possible that God would send me to hell when I died. The first time I embarrassed my parents was when I insisted, at age 10, on being baptized even though I had already been baptized at age 6. I wanted to do it again because I was tormented with worry that I hadn’t believed correctly the first time. After I was baptized the second time I still wasn’t sure but said nothing about it.
When I was eleven and in the sixth grade, I found a child’s biography of Harriet Tubman in my school’s library. I think that the book may have been placed in the wrong school. It was 1959 in segregated Alabama, and it may have been intended for a Black school but somehow got mis-routed. I read it and even gave a book report on it, but though the violence against the child Harriet shocked me to my core, the meaning and import of her life escaped me. I kept waiting for the writer to explain why it was wrong for Harriet Tubman to have gone against the authorities of her day. No such explanation was given, and I was left with the impossible idea that those authorities, which I intuited were the same ones still in place in my world, could not be trusted.