The first black person I ever met,

when I was three or four years old, was a porter on the milk-run train that used to go, still on its Wartime schedule (in, say, 1946), between the miniscule villages of LaCrosse and Hay, Washington--eight miles apart, over the rolling fields of wheat. He was immense--300+ pounds--in his immaculate porter's uniform, and I was curious to know, and asked him pointblank, how he kept himself clean, if the blackness of his skin wouldn't wash off in soap and water, as my mother had assured me that it didn't. The basso profundo of his reply, and his embarrassment, was a revelation to me.