really it all started with kimmy brown, a mousy brown white girl who could fit the description of themoma can be which i loved. tammy screamed the love dirty figure to me on the playground at recess when i was eight years old. i only registered bigger as a word i heard my father use among his friends because it wasn't insult. she delivered it with such force that my body recoiled from the shock of it even though i was not fully aware what she meant. that night i came home and asked my mama what does the word nigger mean? before my mother answered my face winced in pain and i said i had never seen that look before but i registered that she hated hearing and knowing that her daughter had been called such a thing. she stopped stirring the pot on the stove and looked at me and said, an ignorant person, a nigger is a ignorant person. tammy might have been an ignorant person but she initiated me into a world of knowing the worst sort. now i want to read a bit from a chapter called bag lady. black women pay the highest cost for investing in respectability politics. first it breeds distrust b