Christa B. Allen

Sometimes work is a bit slow, and I always wanted to be a princess at Disneyland. There were 1,500 of us who auditioned, and 11 of us were hired. I went through all of the training, but never ended up actually getting to play Belle because 'Revenge' started. It was the time of my life, though!

I remember once in junior high school, on a Friday, my mom came home from work and said to my brother and I, 'You know, between us, we have only 27 cents, but we have food in the refrigerator, we have our little garden out back, and we're happy, so we are rich.'

In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.