In the 1940s I lived in Miami, Florida. Miami was an odd place then. (It is an odd place now, but in different ways.) In 1940 Miami was a diverse town in a mostly-Bible Belt state. "Jim Crow" laws prevailed, but the city was Southern and not-Southern at the same time. Many downtown shop-owners displayed signs indicating Spanish was spoken. Visits to and from Cuba were common. The nearby Seminole community pretty much kept to itself, but about twice a year a Seminole man visited my grandparent's shop to sell alligator hides. There was a large American-Jewish community, and a broad range of recent European immigrants who had left for the U.S. while they still could. There were churches and places of worship of every stripe. I don't remember if there were any local "blue laws." My little sister and I had visited the Hialeah race-track on a Sunday when the horses weren't running. Children weren't allowed where gambling was taking place. We had also visited a bustling casino with roulette wheels and "one-armed bandits" (slot machines). The casino was illegal anyway, so the law banning children wasn't necessarily enforced there. There was a more or less openly acknowledged "mob" presence.
My grandmother, who ruled our family, was born in Mississippi around 1883. Her parents had been well-to-do compared to most people in that place and time. She considered herself an aristocrat and looked down on that large percentage of humanity whom she believed ranked beneath her. She was also, in her opinion, very modern and up-to-date. She was pretentious, inadequately educated, extremely confident, very energetic, and hot-tempered. The phrase "hell on wheels" comes to mind.
I was about five years old and riding my tricycle up and down the sidewalk in front of our coquina-rock bungalow, when a woman who lived at the end of the block called out, "Little girl--little girl!" I stopped and she demanded, "What is your religion? What is your family's religion?"
"I don't know," I replied. (I didn't even know if we had one.) The neighbor seemed astonished at my ignorance.
I pedaled my trike home where my Grandmother and my Father were sitting on the screened porch, and asked how I should have answered the question.
My Grandmother promptly responded, "Tell anyone who asks that you are a Gentile."
"Gentile isn't a religion," my Father objected. "It just means not-Jewish."
"Well, we're not Jewish," said my Grandmother.
"What was that Sunday School you attended for awhile?" asked my Father.
"Presbyterian," I said. It seemed long, long ago, but may have been only a year. He was referring to the Sunday School where my Grandmother, my little sister, and I were all expelled.
"Then tell anyone who asks that you are Presbyterian," he said.
"Yes," said my Grandmother, "Presbyterian and Gentile."
Here is how we happened to be expelled: my little sister was in the church nursery and a little boy also in the nursery was a biter. He had bitten other children from time to time with no repercussions except screaming from the victims and admonishment from the adults. One Sunday he bit my sister, leaving a small cut. She promptly bit him back so decisively and strategically that he began gushing blood.
A doctor was summoned from his nearby home. The boy's mother was summoned from the Sanctuary. My grandmother was telephoned.
The nursery volunteers no doubt were expecting a gracious concern for the injured little boy. Not to be. My grandmother arrived, outraged that any grandchild of hers had been damaged in the slightest way. She didn't give a damn about the the other child and made that perfectly clear in language that had never before been heard inside that church (and maybe never before been heard in any other church.)
So the entire family was expelled and told never, ever to return. There was no way to know for sure, but I suspected that the little boy probably gave up biting other children.