Washington • I raised my hand. The nun called on me.

She was telling my grade-school class at Nativity — 7-year-olds in green uniforms — about the pitiless epoch of slavery.

I thought I had an important counterintuitive point to make — even though it would be another decade before I knew what “counterintuitive” meant.

“One thing,” I piped up, “is that we got all these really great people in our country.”

Although Washington has always been very segregated, my family lived in an integrated neighborhood and my two best friends were Black sisters named Deborah and Peaches. I was about to tell the nun about them when she crooked her finger and beckoned me to the front of the room.

When I got there, she roughly pulled me over her lap, yanked my pinafore up and spanked me hard — delivering

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