It was either the summer of 1959 or 1960. I was four years old, or close enough that the difference doesn’t matter. At that age, time isn’t measured in years anyway. It’s measured in naps, thirst, and how long it takes to get where the grownups say you’re going.
We were headed east from Dallas, Texas, driving through the South toward Cleveland, Tennessee. My sister and her husband were in college there. There may have already been babies involved, which meant grandchildren to my parents, and grandchildren have a way of turning long road trips into necessities.
We were riding in a red Edsel with gray trim. Four doors. Bench seats. No air conditioning. My dad used to joke that it had “460 A/C,” meaning four windows down at sixty miles an hour. In a Texas summer, or an Alabama one, that wasn’t really a joke. That was the plan.
The engine was big. A 410 cubic inch V8 with a four-barrel carburetor. My dad liked to say it would pass anything but a gas station. I didn’t fully understand what that meant, but I knew it was a compliment. It meant the car was strong. It meant we weren’t creeping along. It meant forward motion.
I was the youngest in the family. My brother was almost nine years older than me. Old enough to understand engines, old enough to help my dad fix things when they broke, which they sometimes did. At one point, when the electric gear selector went out, my dad and brother rigged up a makeshift shifter using wire cables and a wooden handle. I didn’t question it. Cars were just things grown men figured out how to keep moving.
Mostly, I watched.
Road trips were different then. No seat belts. No screens. No bottled water rolling around on the floorboard. You looked out the window. You listened. You drifted in and out of sleep. You learned the rhythm of motion without knowing that’s what you were learning.
We stopped for gas somewhere in Alabama. Back then, you didn’t pump it yourself. An attendant did. While my dad talked to him, I noticed something important.
I was thirsty.
That kind of thirsty you only get when it’s hot, the windows are down, and the wind feels warm instead of cool. I spotted the water fountains nearby. Two of them, side by side. That struck me as odd. I don’t remember seeing two before.
I was just learning to read. Not formally. School didn’t start that early in those days. But you picked things up. Letters on signs. Labels. Brand names. Words that mattered.
One fountain had a word printed on it in bold letters. The other had a different word.
I studied them.
One said “WHITE.”
The other said “COLORED.”
I didn’t know what either of those words really meant yet, at least not the way the adults did. What I did know was that I wanted cold water. And somehow, my young brain tried to make sense of those letters through that lens. “White” didn’t look like “cold.” It looked more like “hot,” which seemed like a strange spelling choice. “Colored” didn’t register at all.
I wasn’t thinking about people. I wasn’t thinking about rules. I was thinking about thirst.
I was four.
That moment would stay with me for reasons I couldn’t have explained then. At the time, it was just a pause in a long drive. A gas stop. A hot day. A small boy trying to decode the world one word at a time.
Years later, the memory would rearrange itself as I learned what those words really meant, and why there were two fountains in the first place. But at the time, none of that existed yet in my mind.
What did exist was my father.
He never let a person’s skin color cloud his judgment of their character. I didn’t learn that through lectures or lessons. I learned it the way children always do. By watching what matters to the people raising them, and what doesn’t.
That trip east through Alabama was just one of many miles on a family road. A big car. A hot summer. Windows down at sixty. A gas stop along the way.
The meaning would come later.
