I was born into fairly pristine circumstances where the daddies went to work every day and the mommies stayed home with their children. My parents stayed married, the bills were paid. Dad didn’t beat mom and mom didn’t do drugs, or even smoke after the Surgeon General said not to. We had presents at Christmas and marshmallow bunnies at Easter. We went shopping every year for school clothes. We had a yard, and in the yard was a dog that rolled over and sat up. We never even heard the words “drive-by shooting.”

I have no reason to whine. My life was so much better than most. But at the risk of joining the chorus of complaint that has wafted up from a generation self-taught in self pity, I will share one gripe; I grew up in an all-white world.

Well, not exactly all white. There was Maurice, the black custodian at Brown Port Shopping Center, who traipsed the sidewalks singing B.B. King songs in a voice that would most certainly qualify as soulful. There was Joe Parchee, the slight, high-I.Q. boy who was bussed in from the city in an effort to “integrate” our (all white) High School. And there was Estelle, our cleaning lady.

Estelle came into my world surrounded with myth and mystery. My mother had prepared me for her arrival by telling me in a whisper that Estelle’s son was a Black Panther and had been involved in police shootings in Milwaukee. I expected her to somehow bear the marks of her son’s crime-soaked reputation, envisioning a hard, sensual looking woman, perhaps an aging beauty or a tatoo-ed ghetto queen. Instead, Estelle looked and acted remarkably like Aunt Jemima. Except quieter. In fact, she never spoke unless spoken to.

And this bothered me. I was, after all, a neophyte of the sixties Hippie culture, which held hands with Civil Rights Movement and purported to tear down the walls of race and social status, restoring equality and harmony in the world. So what was this silence between us but a vibration broken in mid-air like a bird song muffled by a cat paw? It was never meant to be, this silence, and so I would will it away.

When I came through the front door Tuesday afternoons, there she would be, the black servant in my all-white kingdom, showing silent respect as if I required it. But Estelle, I wanted to say, I was born into this kingdom. I didn’t build it or make it what it is. And now that I’m hitting my teens with the force of a freight train, I am analyzing what I have always ignored. And I see gaping holes in the politics that say that you and I are somehow on a different plane just because you work for my mother and your skin doesn’t match mine. So let’s be friends, let’s be equals, let’s begin utopia right here and now.

But I couldn’t say all that, so I would simply say, “Do you want some orange juice?”

At which point Estelle would turn slightly from her dusting and croon, “Why, yes, that would be so nice.”

This was the weekly ritual for the two of us. A peace offering of orange juice to a race of people long ravaged by my own. In her people’s behalf she accepted graciously, willing away the bitter darkness as the sweet nectar of sunshine washed her throat. It was all I could manage, as encumbered as I was with my own conditioning. God forgives me for that and so did Estelle.

But the journey toward the light continued. At college, again, I was surrounded by kids as spoiled and white as I, but whose pantheons included the likes of Martin Luther King and Jimmy Hendrix. This was another attempt to keep the people of color at a distance, though. Put them on a pedestal, yes, that’s it. Our great-grandparents traded them like cars, our grandparents made them ride in the back, our parents shut them out of their country clubs but we are going to make up for it all and saint them.

This didn’t ring a bell either. Unconscious curiosity drove me to wonder if people of different ethnicities could actually thrive together. Was there something in our very natures that propelled us away from each other like a bunch of magnets? Or was there a chemical incompatibility that would automatically lead to explosion, like the bleach and ammonia Estelle used in cleaning our already clean house? I had to know, and the only way to find out was to try. But then, I lived in an all-white world.

Until I knew Jesus. This Monument marks the turning point in my journey toward personal ethnic diversification. The reason for this is simple. Jesus is black and white and every color in between. We Westerners paint Him like a blue-eyed Nordic. Actually he probably walked the earth in a Semitic bronze with black curls. But none of that really counts. The Heart of Hearts was every color and every blood-type, every man, woman and child rolled into One. Perfect identification with the race of man in total. That’s my Jesus, and I love Him for it.

And likewise His church, His body, straddles the myriad breaches of race, culture, background, status. When I accepted the Lord, I embraced His body, and so plunged finally into the mass of humanity I had always secretly craved. My Christian friends, like the redeemed of all ages are of “every nation, kindred, tongue and people.” This is one white woman for whom heaven will be no culture shock.

I praise God that the cycle has been broken with my generation. My children’s best friends growing up were the five little African American kids who moved in next door. “Here comes the neighborhood,” I thought when they came to play. My kids had no idea what history was being made. They just enjoyed the fruits of their mother’s ethnic uncleansing.

I knew the corner had been turned when a few years ago my daughter bought a Little Mermaid doll for her cousin. She chose a black doll that looked like her best friend, who looked a lot like a young Whitney Houston. I helped her wrap her Christmas presents, and when I saw the black doll bought for her white cousin, I said, “Why did you get that kind of doll, Kimmy?”

Kimmy looked at me with wide blue eyes as innocent as a lamb, and asked, “What kind of doll?”