I can’t smell very well today – I have a stuffy nose.

After the war, black women continued to labor as “rehandlers,” sorting, stripping, stemming, and hanging tobacco leaves—all part of the redrying process.

Again I begged her to keep an eye on her blood pressure and not get so worked up, and once more she brushed me off, this time with a curt request that I would go and boil my head. … Beginning with a curt “Listen, Buster,” she proceeded to sketch out with admirable clearness the salient points in the situation as she envisaged it […]

Although by no means a card-carrying feminist—and who was in those days, besides some shapeless, tweedy, old left-over suffragettes among the emeritae?—I knew from that time onward that I was not going to be one of those model domestic women.