As we grew, we spoke more about drugs and sex and life choices, about race and inequality and politics. My parents didn‘t expect us tobe saints. My father, I remember, made a point of saying that sex wasand should be fun. They also never sugarcoated what they took to be theharder truths about life. Craig, for example, got a new bike one summerand rode it east to Lake Michigan, to the paved pathway along RainbowBeach, where you could feel the breeze off the water. He‘d been promptlypicked up by a police officer who accused him of stealing it, unwilling toaccept that a young Black boy would have come across a new bike in anhonest way. (The officer, an African American man himself, ultimatelygot a brutal tongue-lashing from my mother, who made him apologizeto Craig.) What had happened, my parents told us, was unjust but alsounfortunately common. The color of our skin made us vulnerable. It wasa thing we‘d always have to navigate.- P25
This particular form of discrimination altered the destinies of gen-erations of African Americans, including many of the men in my family,
limiting their income, their opportunity, and, eventually, their aspira-tions. As a carpenter, Southside wasn‘t allowed to work for the largerconstruction firms that offered steady pay on long-term projects, giventhat he couldn‘t join a labor union. My great-uncle Terry, Robbie‘s hus-band, had abandoned a career as a plumber for the same reason, insteadbecoming a Pullman porter. There was also Uncle Pete, on my mother‘sside, who‘d been unable to join the taxi drivers‘ union and instead turnedto driving an unlicensed jitney, picking up customers who lived in theless safe parts of the West Side, where normal cabs didn‘t like to go. Thesewere highly intelligent, able-bodied men who were denied access to stable- P38
high-paying jobs, which in turn kept them from being able to buy homes, send their kids to college, or save for retirement. It pained them, I know,
to be cast aside, to be stuck in jobs that they were overqualified for, towatch white people leapfrog past them at work, sometimes training newemployees they knew might one day become their bosses. And it bredwithin each of them at least a basic level of resentment and mistrust: Younever quite knew what other folks saw you to be.- P39
It was another small push out into the world. I‘m sure that in herheart my mother knew already that he‘d make the right choice. Everymove she made, I realize now, was buttressed by the quiet confidence thatshe‘d raised us to be adults. Our decisions were on us. It was our life, nothers, and always would be.- P47
