High Price

never be so rude as to address an adult with whom we had not negotiated such intimacy. And I also saw how my parents and other adults in the neighborhood responded to their power and how cautious and cowed they could be in its presence.
    One of my worst memories is seeing my mother break down and cry when confronted by an unsympathetic white bureaucrat about our food stamp allowance, when I was nine or ten. We clearly needed the assistance: I could see how bare the cabinets and fridge were. Yet this woman acted as though my mother were trying to steal money from her personally. At home, MH was tough. She often stood up to my father, who was much bigger and stronger. She never showed much emotion beyond anger about it. But this unyielding bureaucrat’s power and petty condescension and my mother’s powerlessness in the face of it just broke her.
    Indeed, although I don’t remember feeling sad about my mother’s absence, I’m sure I missed her and was angry that she wasn’t around. I was frightened by my parents’ fighting, felt powerless over the way I was treated, and was enraged by things like the biases I saw in the world and at my grandmother’s house. In my family, one of the few feelings it was okay for males to express was anger—and to do that properly, you needed to have power or else you would be crushed. When I was little, I got crushed a lot: by my mother, aunts, sisters, and cousins. So that was a lesson I learned early as well.
    Although I had carefree and childish fun, too, much of my childhood was spent securing status and power in any way I could. If it didn’t give you clout or influence, if it didn’t make you cool or make you laugh, I wasn’t interested. That focus shaped my youth in many complicated and often conflicting ways. As I look back, it’s painful because this struggle for respect ultimately marred or even took the lives of many of my peers. I know now that childhood shouldn’t be dominated by a preoccupation with status. But to some extent, mine was. This obsession was another key survival strategy that molded me.
    So did the stark contrast in my world before and after my parents split. When they were together, the fighting was terrifying, but we lived in a nice neighborhood of young working-class families. It now reminds me of the idealized suburb of TV’s The Wonder Years , only with black people. The homes were neat, with manicured lawns and flat one-story houses of the psychedelic-faded-to-pastel colors people seem to favor near beaches. Ours was a particularly lurid aqua.
    The smell of freshly cut grass brings me back there even now, my dad taking pride in our yard with fruit trees—lemons, limes, oranges, Chinese plums, some belonging to us, others in the neighbors’ yards—out back. Our lawn and yard were always extremely well kept, though the chaos of a family with so many young children meant that toys would sometimes be scattered about. My father was especially fond of our lime tree, which grew fruits so large, they looked more like green oranges. He loved to show off those huge limes. Fresh citrus fruits like that remind me of that time before it all changed.
    Before the divorce, Christmases and birthdays brought the Big Wheels and Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots that we boys coveted; after the divorce, you knew not even to ask for those kinds of presents. Before, our neighbors were mostly intact families, people with decent jobs, adults who believed in the American dream (at least the black version) and had children with similar aspirations. Our neighborhood was relatively safe. We had the occasional break-ins and robberies but no gunfire. Its values were those of the mainstream, that broad swath of mainly white middle-class America that social scientists and politicians use as a measuring stick and try to evoke as a cultural touchstone.
    True, one of my uncles had been shot to death while sitting on the toilet in the bathroom of a club, an innocent bystander who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that was unusual and it happened far away from our home. That kind of violence didn’t haunt our neighborhood. While we didn’t live in the Miami of postcard-perfect beaches and Art Deco hotels, our block was clean and tidy. It was occupied by hardworking strivers, the type who sought above all to be respectable.
    Afterward, however, although my mom kept us out of the actual projects until 1980 when I was in high school, we moved about once a year and