e local "whitefolks."
Maya is self-conscious about her thickset ugliness compared to Bailey's physical beauty, which the old ladies in Momma's church circle persistently lament in casual conversation (17). She is also conscious of being "other," although she remembers "never believing that whites were really real. . . . People were those who lived on my side of town. I didn't like them all, or, in fact, any of them very much, but they were people. These others, the strange pale creatures that lived in their alien unlife, weren't considered folks. They were whitefolks" (21). Despite this, Maya becomes conscious of a kind of self-contempt. For as unreal as whitefolks seem, in rural Stamps even the lowest of whites, the rural "powhitetrash" whose landlady is Momma and whose children go out of their way to insult Momma and are typical of the "unembarrassed and unapologetic" manner of whites talking to blacks (49). In Stamps, Maya absorbs the overt and covert lessons of 1930s segregation in the rural American South:
People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn't buy vanilla ice cream. . . . A light shade had been pulled down between the Black community and all things white, but one could see through it enough to develop a fear-admiration-contempt for the white "things"--white folks' cars and white glistening houses and their children and their women. But above all, their wealth that allowed them to waste was the most enviable. . . . Of course, I knew God was white too, but no one could have made me believe he was prejudiced (40).
Thus it is that in the passage that opens the book Maya fantasizes that she is "really white" and has been turned into a "too-big Negro girl" by magic: "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat" (2-3).
The experience of being Other is always present in Maya's ...