If at the age of 10 I had known the definition of homogeneity I would have marveled at what a pure model Benson, North Carolina was of it. Most of the families who lived in and around Benson had roots that went back well over a hundred years, and except for the fact that some of us were white and others were black, we were all cut pretty much from the same cloth.

It was a town where everybody knew everybody, and I was related to a substantial minority by blood. There were people in my family who could trace the bloodlines for generations and identify my third or fourth cousins. Most of us ate the same kinds of things, talked the same way, and generally didn’t understand a lot about the world beyond the South.

In fact, until the Abdallas moved to Benson, we didn’t have any family whose last name ended in a vowel.

We were mostly Protestant, although there were a few Catholics in town, fewer than twenty, as I remember, and they were all from families that had come to Benson from Lebanon. And we had one Jew, Jake Greenthal.

In all, it was probably the best place in the world to learn about diversity. Simply because it’s hard to subscribe to a stereotype when there’s not enough of those in any way different from you to make up a ghetto, a group or a mob. For instance, anti-Semitism is essentially impossible when the only Jewish person you know is a small man with jug ears who has a reputation for being kind to everybody. Daddy worked on Saturdays for Mr. Greenthal, and he never had anything but good to say about him.

The same thing was true with the Catholics, although sometimes the revival people would try to whip up some righteous indignation with an anti-Papist sermon. But the Catholics I knew — Libby Massad, and later Shea and Jeanette Badour — didn’t seem any more different to me than the Methodists or Freewill Baptists. (In fact, when Shea and Jeanette’s father passed away, most of the high school went to the little Catholic Church for the funeral, and as far as I know, nobody suffered any lasting ill effects.)

It was a little more difficult with the black population, not only because there were lot more of them, but because my grandparents had been raised by people who had grown up during the Reconstruction. One of my grandmothers never grew out of it. One of grandfathers tried his best to be prejudiced, but—because he cared about individuals—he couldn’t quite pull it off. He got really ticked when I had a black singer with one of my bands. The fact that he sounded just like Nat King Cole didn’t matter. But not much later, he closed his filling station for several days while he tried to get assistance for a black family who needed food and clothes.

In any event, I had my parents for guidance, and neither of them had much to say about groups. In fact, one of my mother’s most memorable sayings was, “You don’t look down on anybody, and you don’t let anybody look down on you.” Words to live by.

Looking back on it, it took a lot of denial to follow the received wisdom regarding race. For instance, that wisdom said that blacks were lazy, but when the large black woman picking cotton in the row beside me picked more than 200 pounds a day (to my 60 or 70), it was hard to say that she was lazy. (Picking cotton was certainly not my calling, but that’s another story.) There was also the idea that blacks were dirty; however, they did the cooking in the better homes, and I was partially raised (two days a week) by Leola, whom I not only respected, but loved.

The long and short of it is that it’s difficult to subscribe to stereotypes when you see individuals who don’t fit the patterns. And, in Benson, what we mostly dealt with were individuals. There was not a flood or a tidal wave of immigration, as some people describe it now. In Benson, it wasn’t even a steady drip.

(After I was grown, I found myself on the receiving end of this same kind of prejudice. Some people in the North, again dealing in stereotypes, believed that anyone who spoke with a southern drawl was, at best, a little slow and, at worst, really dumb. I enjoyed the advantage of those low expectations when I was pitching accounts in New York. However, I also discovered my own perceptions of New Yorkers as being brash and rude didn’t hold up when I got to know people like the Santoras in Queens.)

I still have some unanswered questions. One of them was why the Abdallas, the Josephs, and the Massads or Mr. Greenthal came to Benson. It couldn’t have been anybody’s dream of a city with streets of gold. It was rumored that Mr. Greenthal came from Baltimore, and I wonder if his family exiled him to Benson, but I never knew. The others had probably landed there for good reason, but not one that they shared with me.

I did know that all of these people came to Benson and made a contribution. The Abdallas, the Josephs, and Mr. Greenthal all owned clothing stores. The Massads, as I recall, owned several stores over the years, including the wine shop on the corner until Johnston County went dry and all of the alcohol was supplied by bootleggers.

Now I live in a county where you can hear a half-dozen different languages in the checkout line at Krogers. Where there are signs in Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, and some other scripts that I don’t recognize. In fact, for a long time there was a used car lot on Buford Highway with a sign in Korean and Spanish and no English. And I’ve learned to enjoy it, because these are individuals, just like the people I grew up with, even though they’re not from around here.

And now, when I walk into Starbucks and see a Muslim lady working on her laptop in a full burqa, I don’t feel threatened or catalog all of the things I’ve heard about the Muslims. The only thing that crossed my mind was, “How do you drink coffee wearing something like that?” Obviously the lady had the answer to the question, but my southern reserve has kept me from asking it. So far.