When we PCSed into New Orleans two years ago, Mayor Ray Nagin hadn't mentioned to anyone that it was a “chocolate city.” People had a lot of other things to say about it. A retired Navy couple up the block even told us that the Big Easy was more like a third world country than the average American town. “Think of it as another overseas tour,” they said. “Watch and learn.”

So we did. Our house was in one of the historic sections of the city. People called it mixed -- high income, low income, no income folks all lived near each other. That seemed kind of hip to me, kind of cool for a woman who had grown up in the ‘burbs.

We hadn't lived there a week before I realized that the neighborhood was actually segregated. A few blacks did live north of Opelousas, the live oak-lined street that led to our area. My next-door neighbors were Honduran. The rest of my neighbors were all white -- rich and poor, gay and straight, military or civilian, they were white. Our homeless people were even white.

On the south side of Opelousas, I never saw a white person walking. Never. I drove through that area every day to get to the bridge, but I never saw a white person.

That seemed strange to me -- that dividing line. But New Orleans wasn't like any other city. This was a rich, meaty, unexpected gumbo of a city -- such a contrast to the Chicken and Stars places where I grew up. What an opportunity!

That's what I told myself. Right up until I tried to find a football team for our fifth grader. A transplanted Ohioan told me that white kids in New Orleans didn't play football until junior high. He said that the playground leagues were all black. “Play soccer,” he advised.

That's when I called my mother. She was a military wife, too. I thought she would know whether a person who wants social justice should run out and insist on being included on a black team? Or whether a military family ought to lay low until we figure out the local rules?

“Oh, Honey, it isn't your job to integrate the entire city of New Orleans,” she said. She wasn't voting for racism. She was thinking of my enormous list of things to do. And I, in my mixed-neighborhood-that-wasn't-really-mixed, felt relieved when she said it. I had 400 boxes to unpack. Let someone else be the Martin Luther King of the kiddie football world.

Then my husband came home from the shipyard with the name of a team with three white kids in the program. The team let Sam join even though it was so late in the season. “We think you military people could use a break,” they told my husband.

From right here, I could tell this story like this was the most positive thing ever, our quintessential New Orleans experience. I could tell how some of the parents brought brass bands to cheer their team; how whole families of aunts and uncles and cousins would come see one kid play. How I sat with a gold medal winning Olympic athlete at one of the games. If I told it that way, the “chocolate city” Mayor Nagin spoke of last week might seem like a reasonable idea.

But I also have to tell the part of the story where this man stood right behind me wondering aloud why they let “that slow white kid” on the team. I was the only white person present. He said this in my ear.

I'd have to say I worried that the other kids wouldn't like my boy because he was white, not because he was loud or silly. I worried Sam wasn't getting more play time because he was white, not because he was, maybe, a little slow. I'd have to say that enlightened little me went to the race question first, last, always, still.

Me. It's not just Mayor Nagin. Me. This slays me. Because Nagin and I were both born after Brown vs. Board of Education. We were both born after the Civil Rights Movement. We both grew up with Gordon and Susan and Bob and Maria living cheek by jowl on Sesame Street. And yet we both apparently say and do and think racist things.

Or we don't. Maybe everything we say about race is so cluttered and obscured and secret that we don't understand what anyone else is talking about. Which may be worse.

This brouhaha over Nagin's speech discourages me -- especially on Martin Luther King Day. I may make my little efforts to live in a mixed area. I may raise my children in a way that they at least play and work with children of other races. I may point out dividing lines just as hidden, just as visible as Opelousas Street.

And still I fear that our progress seems so slow. Too slow. Like watching hair grow. Like watching granite erode. Like watching liquid chocolate spin and spin.