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[[strikethrough]] uncles and two cousins, where lynched in Mississippi.  It was my mother to whom I was closest.  My father died when I was eight.  My mother later married again, but she parted from my step-father when I was thirteen, and from that time on we faced [?] problems together, looking after on another.  When I was seven she[[//strikethrough]]

bought me a set of oil paints, and I painted my first picture, which she still has.  When I was nine, she bought me a violin and got me a music teacher.  I scratched away on the instrument for about seven years, but my all-consuming interest was painting and drawing.  I liked music, and I think that music has had a deep and helpful influence on my painting.  But I rensented the time given over to practise on the violin, and whenever I thought my mother wasn't watching, I would drop it for the paint brush.  My mother would have preferred me to be a musician, but in this, as in everything else throughout our life together, she had a wonderful fund of patience, always gentle with me, trying to understand why some things of which she thought less meant so much to me, never xxxxxxx criticizing me sharply or harshly. 

From the earliest years I can remember, XXXXXXXXX I was XXXX made conscious of the fact that there were "differences" between Negro people and white.  I played [strikethrough] with white children.  My mother was a domestic worker, traveling to white people's houses to scrub their floors, wash their clothes and cook for them.  When I was a baby in arms she would take me to these homes, as there was nobody to look after me [strikethrough] and I would sometimes play with the children there.  We lived in a very poor, ramshackle neighborhood of Chicago, and were for a time the only Negro people on the street.  I would play with the neighbor's children, but the feeling that there were "differences" permeated the air, growing more intense, of course, as we grew older.  It became even more