Charley: I should have known. I spent summers here, I know how people think. And I didn't prepare him for living in the South. I don't know what I thought. That he's smart? That he'll figure it out; he'll make it work. I didn't protect him, not like how you were protecting me. Isn't that what you said when you sent me up to boarding school? You were protecting me.
Lorna: I sent you away to school because you were a black woman in a white world and you needed the best education and the best pedigree.
Charley: It wasn't enough.
Lorna: And that is why I sent you to spend summers here, so that you would know where you came from and have that identity.
Charley: But then I had to go home and I felt the opposite at home. Like I had to manage my blackness, like there was no room for it. Like it was something I put on a few weeks of the year. I know you don't understand that.
Lorna: Why?
Charley: Because you can't. Because you can't understand that.
Lorna: Because I'm white, is that what you're trying to say? Well, I did the best that I could by you and that is what any mother does for their child. And that is what you have done for Micah. And he is strong, just like you.