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13

I've always been happy I was born in the South.  I've always appreciated the beauty of the South--the weather, the roses, the magnolia trees . . . . We had the most beautiful trees in our yard.  I remember a banana tree particularly.  I loved to look up through it, at the patterns it made against the sky.25

Her inspiration came from natural phenomena--the sky, the earth, and the changing cycles of the seasons.  Her forms and color were always derived from nature.  Many of these early impressions were stored in her memory for decades, particularly the bucolic summers spent at Grandfather Cantey's Alabama plantation:

I remember the gorgeous sunsets; I remember the lovely fowl . . . There were the peacocks.  In the afternoons we would sit on the front porch while they came and put on their display for us . . . I would go wandering through the plantation finding the most unusual wildflowers.  And the cotton--oh, that was a gorgeous sight; as far as you could see, beautiful flowers, white with a bit of pink, bell-shaped.26

Yet the hard reality of the segregated South lay outside the front door of Rose Hill.  Thomas recalled later that:

It was the hardest thing to find a white person who'd want to "miss" you.  You were a girl as long as you were young, and you were "Auntie" when you got old.27

She often recalled that in Washington she could go to a library, but in Columbus, "there was only one library . . . and the only way to go in there as a Negro would be with a mop and bucket to wash and scrub something."28  Libraries, like museums, were closed to blacks.

Walking past the white school only two doors away from Rose Hill, Thomas and her sister attended the segregated