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Ida Mae walked a mile to the big house across the pastureto gather eggs for Miss McClenna in the evenings. She always hoped for a lot of eggs. If there were too many for Miss McClenna to carry herself, she would take Ida Mae into Okolona with her. It was the only chance Ida Mae got to go into town.
    Ida Mae gathered more than usual one time, and Miss McClenna took her into Okolona to help her sell them to the white people in town. They delivered the eggs to customers’ houses, straight to their doors, and Miss McClenna had Ida Mae carry the basket of eggs for her.
    The day had gone well until they knocked on one woman’s door to make a delivery. Ida Mae stood with the basket behind Miss McClenna as Miss McClenna prepared to step inside.
    “You can’t bring that nigger in,” the woman said from her front door as soon as she saw Ida Mae.
    Miss McClenna knew what that meant. She motioned for Ida Mae to go to the back door to deliver the eggs while Miss McClenna stepped inside to complete the transaction.
    On the way back home, Miss McClenna seemed unsettled by it.
    “Did you hear what she called you?” Miss McClenna asked Ida Mae.
    “Yeah, but I ain’t pay it no attention,” Ida Mae said. “They call you so many names. I never pay it no attention.”
    The incident jarred Miss McClenna. The “hardware of reality rattled her,” as the artist Carrie Mae Weems would say decades later of such interactions. 4
    What few people seemed to realize or perhaps dared admit was that the thick walls of the caste system kept everyone in prison. The rules that defined a group’s supremacy were so tightly wound as to put pressure on everyone trying to stay within the narrow confines of acceptability. It meant being a certain kind of Protestant, holding a particular occupation, having a respectable level of wealth or the appearance of it, and drawing the patronizingly appropriate lines between oneself and those of lower rank of either race in that world.
    An attorney’s wife in Alabama, for instance, was put on notice one day at a gathering at her home for the upper-class women in her circle. Between the hors d’oeuvres and conversation, one of the clubwomen noticed, for the first time apparently, a statuette of the Virgin Mary on a cabinet in the hostess’s living room. The guest cattily remarked upon it.
Why, she never knew that the hostess and her family were Catholics!
    The attorney’s wife was shaken by the accusation, and quickly replied that
of course not, they were Methodists and she thought everyone knew that. She only had the statuette because she happened to like it
.
    But after the party was over and the guests were gone, the accusation haunted her, and she fretted over the implication that she might be seen as a member of a lesser tribe. That day, the attorney’s wife took down the statuette of Mary that she liked so much and put it away for good. She could not afford even the appearance of having stepped outside the bounds of her caste.
    Neither could Miss Julie McClenna. As far as Ida Mae knew, Miss McClenna never sold eggs to that lady again. But that was also the end of her brief employment with Miss Julie McClenna and the end of the trips into Okolona. “She never did take me no more after that,” Ida Mae said.

    In the bottoms where Ida Mae grew up, it was a crazy enough world that they could almost time the weekends by a white farmer who lived down the road.
    He was fine when he was sober and actually liked colored people. But he got drunk on Fridays and came staggering on his old horse to the colored people’s cabins. They could hear the hoof steps and hollering as he rode in waving his gun.
    “I’m coming through!” he shouted.
    Grown people dropped their buckets and went running. Children hid under the cabins on the dirt floor between the stilts, while he huffed and cussed and tried to smoke them out.
    “I’m a shoot y’all!” he hollered. “I’m a kill y’all!”
    There was always a commotion