Maine has been a trial this winter, with ice dams forming on roofs and icy water turning sidewalks and streets into treacherous paths. So perhaps I was attracted to this chapter because I needed to experience -- albeit vicariously -- a place where the water is warm enough to swim in.

Unfortunately Mr. White's chapter starts off by telling us "It is raining to beat the cars." That dashed my hopes of hearing about the author sunning himself on a hot beach with a cool drink! But I was delighted with the way he described the sea: "rollers from a westerly storm are creaming along the shore, making a steady boiling noise instead of the usual intermittent slap."

However the reason I liked this chapter so much was his discussion of "color added." He talks about the oranges that are grown right there in Florida but are dyed organge, and that there are "millions of children who have never seen a natural orange -- only an artificially colored one. If they should see a natural orange they might think something had gone wrong with it." He chides us for making fraudulence a national virtue. Despite the fact that organic foods and farmers' markets are popular today, wouldn't EB be appalled at the practice we still support of buying perfect fruits and vegetables, dyed, wrapped in cellophane and trucked across the country half ripe?

From colored oranges the author moves on to talk about colored people. In the Florida Key piece he bemoaned the fact that colored people were barred from one of the movie theaters and only allowed in the balcony of the other. He thought Southern feelings about color quite laughable -- Negroes barred from movie houses because of color, the orange with "color added." But although he wanted to cry out against the lack of liberty and justice, he didn't. Were his beliefs not strong enough? Or was it just his shyness that prevented him from following through?

What would he have felt about race attitudes today, I wonder? Yes we just elected a black man as President. But a short time ago, after 9/11, American prejudice against other races didn't seem to have changed much since the 1940s. Would he feel we've made any real progress?

The chapter ends with a return to the sea which answers all questions. When we read about all the bickering and the turmoil and the threats, he says, we can close our eyes and "the sea dispatches one more big roller in the unbroken line since the beginning of the world." Beautiful.

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