High Price

no longer shared the same values. What I once saw as her happy-go-lucky and carefree spontaneity began to seem like irresponsibility. As I got more serious about my career, I wanted someone similar. That was part of what attracted me to Terri, the ambitious business major whose parents were not exactly thrilled by our relationship.
    By my last semester when I graduated, I learned that I was on the dean’s list: no more Cs. I could hardly believe it. After getting the good news, I went to a nearby playground with Terri. She was a diligent and organized student and I thought she was extremely intelligent. I also saw that she put a lot of effort into her own schoolwork.
    As we sat on some swings, Terri told me, “You’ve got it. You can do whatever you want in terms of education.” She looked me in the eyes to be sure I took it in. I knew she was going places herself. For her to say that about me really meant something. It was the first time I believed I could actually get my PhD. But before I could attend graduate school, I still had some deficiencies to remedy.
    Soon I found myself spending twelve hours at a stretch in the lab, at least five times a week. Rob began to teach me to operate on the brains of the rats we were studying. After I got over my initial fear and disgust, I found that I was good at it. Soon I was basically doing brain surgery with ease, using a surgical suite that looked like it was set up for tiny dolls.
    My undergraduate work also came at a time of tremendous excitement in neuroscience. That, too, inspired me, at times when my motivation began to flag. In 1990, as I mentioned earlier, Congress and President George H. W. Bush declared the 1990s to be the decade of the brain, calling for greater national focus on neuroscience to accompany the increased funding the field was receiving. It seemed like important new discoveries were being made every day. We thought we would soon find answers to the deepest and most difficult questions about thought, desire, and action, questions that had challenged the greatest human minds for centuries. I was studying the heart of the system that was said to provide pleasure and drive desire, a specific dopamine network in the center of the brain. We figured we were close to understanding how it worked.
    I felt like I was really learning something, that this knowledge was important and vital. If we could understand dopamine, we would decipher desire and unlock addiction. The science itself was intoxicating. With enthusiastic encouragement from Rob, Don, and Jim, I was soon on my way to graduate school. The black kid who’d once been in the trailer for the learning disabled, whom his high school had relegated to business math and parking patrol class, was now on his way to a doctorate. I could now see a clear way out of the maze.

CHAPTER 11
    Wyoming
    Equal Rights
    — WYOMING STATE MOTTO
    I t was a cold night in Wyoming, not the worst kind, where your face numbs in even a brief exposure, but still a stunning chill that a Floridian has no words to describe and no preparation to cope with. MH and my sister Brenda had braved the late-winter weather for a visit; I was then working on my graduate studies at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Snow was everywhere. As the writer John Edgar Wideman observed in his book Brothers and Keepers , it snowed so much in Wyoming that it could make a grown man cry.
    I’d earlier driven my mom and sister through the sleepy little town where I lived and then brought them to campus. I wanted to show them my lab. On most winter evenings, the campus was dark and desolate: most of the students and faculty quite sensibly did not linger outside. I started to select the right keys from a ring I carried and prepared to let them in. But MH was hesitant to go any further.
    Despite the freezing temperature and our desire to get in out of the cold, I could see reluctance in her eyes. Her thickest winter coat offered little protection—but she was more frightened of entering the building than she was of the elements. She thought we’d get in trouble, possibly be arrested. Even though I had my own set of keys and had told her I worked there day and night, she remained concerned. Part of her still didn’t believe that a black man could legitimately enter a university building at night and that her son was actually a graduate student who spent many long evenings doing scientific research in this alien place.
    The moment stuck with me as a