Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.
And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.
What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children.
Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.
Now, things changed when I discovered African books.
There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.
But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature.
I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.
I started to write about things I recognized.
Now, I loved those American and British books I read.