Black folks and white folks are eating together. Right there, in front of me. Not just eating in the same restaurant, but sitting at actual tables together. Not just black folks. Asian folks are sitting with Latino folks, white folks are sitting with Asian folks, Latino folks with black folks, and every combination in between. You even catch the occasional homogony lilt of an African accent, the beef stew roll of a Russian one, even the bright sun tang of an Australian among the tables. The whole world was sitting in front of me, having some lunch, and nobody thought anything of it.

"Mom! We got on a Little League team!", I said with the enthusiasm only a ten year old can muster. It was, oh, 1978. Star Wars was still dominating the country's theaters, the first "test-tube" (i.e. 'in-vitro') baby was born, and almost a thousand people killed themselves deep in a South American jungle at the command of a madman. I remember all these things, but at the time I didn't care about them. All I cared about was that I was going to be one of the "cool" kids by playing baseball. Oh I hated the game, I was never one for athletics, but it got me with the "in" crowd, and all my friends were there. Well, all except one.

"Why isn't Travis in the league?", I asked. Travis was my best friend. We talked so much on the phone our moms teased us about being a couple of little girls gossiping. We talked about comics (we shared a passion for Spider Man), science fiction (he liked Spock, I liked Kirk, how perfect was that?), the latest bully reports, and who knows what else. I was seriously worried about baseball. Two weird geeky kids are a team. One weird geeky kid is a target.

"Travis? Well... I don't think Travis wants to be in that league," my mom said with the all-too-quick phrasing of someone trying to side-skirt an uncomfortably complex topic.

"What? Well, maybe I can call him and talk him into it."

"No, no, you don't need to do that, I'll talk to his mom later on." Which was mom-jujitsu doing a number on my attention span. Because I didn't know the real reason Travis didn't come to play on our teams. I wouldn't figure it out for years.

Travis, my best friend, was black. I don't know if he was officially barred from our league, but he sure as hell wouldn't have been welcomed. The black folks had their own leagues on the other side of town. I wouldn't have been welcomed there either.

"C'mon nigger, deal the cards!"

It was four years later, 1982, and Travis and I were in our second go-around as roomies at band camp. Fourteen-year-old boys with cash money and no direct supervision, and what do we do? Order some pizzas and start playing cards, of course. Guys are guys, you see, no matter how old they are.

We had V, who had a speech impediment that made him hard to understand but who was smarter than six other people put together, A, a new kid who was a little high-strung but otherwise OK (the fact that his older sister, C, was gorgeous didn't hurt), M, a preacher's kid who would remain the most arrogant and ignorant person I would ever personally know, Travis, and me. We'd scarfed most of the pizza sitting on the gritty-dusty mottled gray asphalt tiled floor of our dorm room and were waiting while A fumbled with the shuffling so we could play a game I can't remember anymore. That's when Travis said that, the most amazingly shocking thing I think I've ever heard anyone say in my life.

"C'mon nigger, deal the cards!"

It was at that point that I got clued in. It literally had not occurred to me up until that second that I was the only white kid in the room. In all honesty, I don't really think anyone else had noticed it either, although I think I caught a sly grin or two as I tried to subtly pick my jaw up off the floor. It was the first time I'd actually witnessed the other double standard, of things that can and cannot be said by certain people at certain times.

I knew on a visceral level that word meant nothing but evil, ignorant rot so foul it made six day old corpses smell sweet. It came out of the mouths of the bullies I hated and feared, out of the mouths of relatives who I was supposed to respect and love but who I could only hold in sad contempt, out of the mouths of preachers and teachers, but only when "off-duty", when they thought nobody who counted would hear.

It also came out of the mouth of my best friend, who up until that time I knew on an academic level was black. To me, he was black as in "wow! I didn't know black people didn't have tan lines!" (to which he replied, "damn, white people have white butts!" The showers in the dorm were "open", you see), something to be remarked on like a hair color or a distinctive birthmark, something we could discuss to distract ourselves from the completely bizarre transformations our bodies were undergoing in the depths of puberty.

For whatever reasons, and I don't really think it was this, our relationship would gradually change, and we would drift apart. He lived in the "nice" section of "his" side of the town, and I lived in the "nice" section of "mine". Oh, we were still able to banter about our differences ("This is what white people do on the weekends?!?" was his incredulous question when I showed him the cruise route for teenagers), but our social lives diverged (he had one, I didn't), and in the mid-80s there was no such thing as a "crossover" relationship, certainly not in the south.

One event, though, sticks clearly in my mind. I was a cook at a Pizza Hut in 1986, and Travis, along with a few other of my high school friends (black and white) were working there. We had an employee meeting about who knows what, sales probably, when the manager mentioned his one real scheduling difficulty. You see, the manager was from California. He didn't know You Didn't Talk About Such Things in the south.

"The biggest problem I have is that I have to keep a white waitress on the clock at all times. A third of the people who come into this place won't speak to a black waitress or waiter. Sonya [who was the nicest lady I ever met, and the best waitress in the whole joint] can walk up to the [very prominent, "pillar of the Baptist church" family] when they come in and they just won't speak to her."

What surprised me wasn't the admission. I'd known there were stupendously ignorant, dangerous, and evil people in my town for years. I was counting the days until I graduated and could escape the entire mouth-breathing mass of them. What surprised me was the complete lack of surprise the black folks expressed when the manager said it.

I've already said many times I study things that interest me. Some things, like science, have interested me for my entire life. Others are struck by an epiphany, a revelation which can happen at the oddest points.

I remember it distinctly. It was a typical hot, muggy, northwest Arkansas July 4th in 1992. I'd come there to go to college, and had settled after graduation while I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I was driving down the "bypass", a sad little excuse for an interstate that surrounded the college town I lived in, steering my old convertible. My beween-the-shoulderblades hair was stinging my eyes as it whipped in the hot towel-snap wind. I was going to the mall, probably to pick up some books, wondering if the sky's ominous color change to soap-scum covered copper would cancel the fireworks scheduled for that night.

While I was driving I pondered the country. How proud I was to be an American. How proud everyone who lived in this country should be. How we were a nation of people who had picked up, packed up, and pushed up to make the most powerful nation on the planet. All except, I suddenly realized, one. One set of people had ancestors who didn't really want to be brought here. People, regardless of who was ultimately to blame, regardless of how ultimately promising their lives turned out to be, who did not seek this country out, but were instead carried here against their will. It sounds almost Joan-of-Arc-ish, but from that point forward, sweating on that dusty road in a car that was more rust than it was steel, I decided to at least try to pay attention to what was going on "on the other side of the tracks", to educate myself as much as I could on what it really was like to be considered different only because of your looks. I started to pay attention, and I watched.

I watched as the bitterness of the civil rights boomers seeped into the racial debate. I watched people who were so deeply naive they really thought they could overturn three centuries of racism in less than a single lifetime grasp desperately for relevance amongst the generation after my own. A generation whose parents were raised integrated, who, no matter what was spoke at home, understood that in the schools and at the workplace it was wrong to notice color (even if you did anyway). I watched them define their failure not by how far race relations had progressed in the courts, not how far they had progressed in the media, but by how far they had progressed in the social order of our life. "Black folks and white folks may be forced to work on equal terms", they would say, "but they don't socialize very much. We don't eat together, and we never will." To them, it seemed, every time the goal was in site the goalposts moved farther away, never getting any closer.

Which are the words that echoed in my head as I walked into "El Pollo Rico", which as I understand it translates into "rich chicken". It's the paragon of the modern "mom-and-pop" local fast food joint, South American style. It happens to be across the street from Ellen's cat clinic, and apparently has the best rotisserie chicken on the planet. You walk in to a stark, plain, florescent-lit dining area with randomly scattered and tightly grouped wooden tables and chairs on white tile, a giant counter at the back flanked by huge ovens filled with chickens doing a slow-roast samba. It is very, very good.

The place was packed when we walked in last Friday. While Ellen waited in line (she knew what to order) I tried to stay out of everyone's way as they busily dissected tasty Peruvian chicken and went over the day's events in the ratchetty buzzy rumble that is a group discussion in a crowded room. It was then that I really noticed what I was seeing...

Black folks and white folks are eating together. Right there, in front of me. Not just eating in the same restaurant, but sitting at actual tables together. Not just black folks. Asian folks are sitting with Latino folks, white folks are sitting with Asian folks, Latino folks with black folks, and every combination in between. Nobody cares, nobody notices, except for one white kid, who can remember wondering why his best friend couldn't play little league on the same team as him.

It can still be dangerous to simply have the wrong color skin in the wrong part of town in this country. But I no longer fear for the future of race in America, all because of what I saw in a dinky little grab-and-go.

In America.