I grew up in Yeadon, Pennsylvania. a suburban but segregated community that later was featured in Time magazine as the first all-black middle-class suburb.

Both my father and mother worked hard for what we had: a big house with a yard. a collie dog. the newspaper on the porch every evening. ..that type of thing. We spent a good deal of time together as a family: We all went to church on Sundays. It was a warm family: My mother was very social. All her family lived close by so we would often take trips to Camden. New Jersey to visit them. We would go down to North Carolina to see my father’s family: We always had at least forty for a sit-down dinner at Christmas. My mother gave a gigantic picnic with all her club members on every other Fourth of July when we had fifty or sixty people at the barbecue. She was like the Perle Mesta of Yeadon.

I took art classes on Saturdays. but my family really encouraged art more as a hobby rather than as a profession. It was made very clear to me that I should pursue something more lucrative. or become a commercial artist so that I could earn my own money:/I> [1991].

I had a very interesting childhood, although I can only say this in retrospect. I had many advantages in my life. I was freed from a lot of pressures that many black women are under in different circumstances. but I was also subjected to a whole new set of dilemmas. I was part of the ten percent black minority in a predominantly white high school. I went to a school that was academically oriented, so as an art major I felt like an outsider. Because of these and other circumstances, I felt isolated from the mainstream black community: For a long time I felt like an outsider. Not until I became aware of and could identify with the world African community could I comfortably express myself [1989/1991].