Nana Biography

In a way she was liberated, that’s right. 

And your dad seem to put you in a more traditional, kind of nudge. 

Well, remember, he was my stepfather, he was a southern, and he was total southern, he believed in white supremacy .  He was a kind man, he wasn’t cruel or anything like that, but he was southern, and this by the time I was 12 years old, I was aware of and resent it, and we had terrible family arguments in that kind of background, because in the south, when you were a child, you were raised to respect your parents, and you had to say, “yes, sir“to him, and you were not allowed to talk back, and once in a while when I did, I was punished. And you didn’t, you just didn’t do it. The way children today are allowed to stamp their feet and say things.

You were punished? How are you punished?

I was sent out of the room or denied, not allowed to ride my ponies for two days, or something like that or my allowance got docked, but I was a naughty little girl in many ways, naughty in this sense. When they would go out to parties, and my cousin was visiting, I had a first , a girl, that used to spend the summers, and one night we came back and the family were just driving in the driveway, and quickly put the ponies away and climbed up the rope ladder to our bedroom, They didn’t even know we had it, and pulled up the rope ladder and just then the door opened and they came in and they caught us before we had got into bed. So what they did was separate us.

-59-