Once upon a time, in a small town near Birmingham, there lived a regular black family who was struggling for their lives in a hostile society. With three kids, Jimmy Bruce, and Kiki, the father and mother, Jarome and Martha, were subjected into working hard for their children. Not many black families were able to succeed in this cruel world of the 1960's. The kids, each being too young and of the wrong race at this point in time, were unable to attend a school or even go to church. Instead, they went to a friend's house whose mom taught them things. This was their school. The life of this family was totally obscene. One day Kiki, their 12-year-old daughter, went for a walk in what they thought was a safe town. While she was walking down the street many racial slurs and comments were made toward her. White people were rare to these parts of the town, but every once in a while, a bunch of white kids, whom just graduated from high school, would drive around the peaceful town of cardboard boxes and lean tubes and yell out and even throw things at the black folks who were unrightfully segregated. As Kiki walked back to her home in an abandoned shack in the middle of a one-acre field, she had tears dripping from her precious brown eyes. When she returned, she saw that her father had been beaten severely as well as her brothers Bruce, who was 13, and Jimmy, 14. "Why do they do this to us Daddy?" she asked out in a horrible cry, "What did we do to them?" She was too young to realize the concept of blacks not belonging in a country that was primarily white. Coping with the devastating treatment toward them, the Washington's kept living their lives. Jarome found a decent job at a farmhouse down the road. The Anderson's farm is what it was called. A rich white family owned it and had three other slaves working for them. The pay was $10.00 a week and a half-full grocery bag of canned corn or beans. The conditions in which they had to work in were ...