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house, they had to bring their own dishes and glasses if they wanted to eat or drink. This struck me as not only nonsensical, but also completely horrible. So did any racist talk: when I went back to the office where I had been working in order to say goodbye, my boss actually said to me: “I don’t want to see you walking down the street with a Nigra or a Jew.” Surrounded as I was by such attitudes, I’m not even sure why my own feelings were so different right from the start. I suspect my father’s example was a major influence on my thinking, because I never heard him utter a single racist or anti-Semitic word. In his job as a salesman he reported directly to his Jewish brother-in-law, a man he liked and respected a great deal.
    Atlanta is now a far more cosmopolitan city than it was in the 1940s, but some attitudes die slowly; forty-three years after I left Atlanta, I returned in June of 1995 for my fiftieth high school reunion. I was standing at the hotel desk when a classmate gave me a friendly holler from down the hall. We talked a bit about our lives—superficial friendly reunion chatter. My career, my life in New York. Her life in Georgia. Bonds renewed. Until, with a big smile, she casually exclaimed, “Barbara, you talk just like a Jew!” I was left completely speechless.
    All the time I had felt I was an outsider who didn’t belong in Atlanta, I thought there must be something wrong with me. Now, after years in New York, I came to realize that there was somethingwrong with them. That sounds a little more dismissive than I mean it to. I have great friends in Georgia—terrific people. It’s just that life there feels right for them, I suppose, but definitely not for me.
    My God, when I think what my life might have been like had I not had the courage to stay in New York. There are others who are so very talented but for some reason or other don’t have the courage or the strength to take the chance, to put themselves on the line. There’s no question that I was putting myself on the line back in 1948—even when I couldn’t even locate exactly where the line was.
    New York was still amply stocked with grand old movie palaces in those days, and I couldn’t stay away. At the Strand or the Paramount you could get a whole evening’s entertainment for fifty cents. There would be a first-run movie, and oftentimes one of the truly great big bands—Tommy Dorsey’s or Glenn Miller’s—and some of the best vaudeville acts in the country. I saw Bill Robinson dance again, and this time was astonished by his gifts. At one performance I attended, Josephine Baker made an electrifying entrance that I’ll never forget, slinking onstage dragging a full-length white mink coat behind her. One of the stranger and more memorable acts was a comedienne who came on dressed primly in a smart suit, hat, gloves, and a fur stole. At the end of her act she daintily removed the stole, set it down on the stage, and watched as it walked off—yes, a live dog had been wrapped around her neck the whole time. It was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen.
    I loved walking down the street, catching snatches of overlapping conversations conducted in an enticing mix of multiple languages. I discovered rice pudding, an exotic delicacy to me—oh, how I loved the taste and texture of it. One day I decided that it was high time I got drunk—another adult indulgence I’d nevertried before. In the apartment where I was staying I found a bottle of Manischewitz, the sweet kosher wine, and one night proceeded to consume it all by myself, just because I could. Some years later, both wine and food would become serious problems for me, but in those exhilarating first days in New York, I was drunk on the city itself.

5 • THE REALITY OF NEW YORK
    I WAS ON my own at last, but with one not so insignificant problem: money. I had arrived in New York with the