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“And Mary, that's my mother, she was right. Every now and then she would stop dancing long enough to tell me something important and one of the things she said was that they never washed their hair and they smelled funny. Roberta sure did. Smell funny, I mean.”

At the very beginning of the short story, Twyla repeats her mother’s prejudices when she first meets Roberta. Mary teaches Twyla to separate groups of people by their race and to be distrusting and suspicious of people of other races. Similarly, Mary teaches Twyla that her own race is an integral part of her identity, and she infers that their race is superior by denigrating the race Roberta belongs to. Twyla takes Mary’s opinion at face value because she is a child who trusts her mother. She even classifies the prejudiced views as an important lesson. Here, Morrison is illustrating the way racial prejudice is indoctrinated into children.

“Oh, Twyla, you know how it was in those days: black-white. You know how everything was.”

But I didn’t know. I thought it was just the opposite. . . . You got to see everything at Howard Johnson’s and blacks were very friendly with whites in those days.

Halfway through the story, Twyla and Roberta reconnect after bumping into each other in an upscale grocery store. This interaction reveals how differently the women experience race and prejudice throughout their lives. The scene is fraught with tension just like the topic often is in real life. Roberta reflects on a period in their youth as one of racial strife while Twyla sees it as one of racial unity, but these details still do not reveal which woman is Black and which is white. Morrison illustrates that race is a social construct by comparing Twyla and Roberta’s perspectives without describing their appearances. The challenge for the reader is not to figure out the race of each woman, but to examine their own inherited prejudices that lead them to make assumptions about the characters’ races.

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