The author as a sophomore at St. Augustine High School, 1960. "When I left San Diego, it was easy to keep going."

Writers, they say, have really only one story to tell. I'm not sure this is so, but if it is then my story is an account of how I lost my soul. It occurred slowly over the course of a decade, with the final moment coming in early September 1955 at 30th and Imperial Avenue. The hot late summer air had turned the sky a yellow color that afternoon. Forty years later I looked up and found that the sky over San Diego was blue. I wondered how long it had taken me to look up, how long it had been blue. This is a true story.

When I left San Diego, it was easy to keep going. There was college and afterwards Europe. I meant to live there and never come back. I sailed the Mediterranean, traded in Morocco’s Casbah, and stood under a blistering sun looking upon Cairo’s Giza pyramid while, with each breath, the hot air scorched my lungs. My flat on Cheyne Walk in London was not far from where Henry James once lived, but in my time it was Mick Jagger, a rock star, and Marianne Faithful who were my neighbors. At Oxford I lectured on American racism and the development of revolutionary consciousness. And when I grew tired of living somewhere else and being exotic, I booked passage on the Euralia and returned to the United States.

The author in his twenties, When Disneyland first opened, for example, we begged to go, but there was not extra money for the trip. “If we eat beans for the next two months," Murr said,

I landed on the East Coast and remained there, 3000 miles from the place where I had lost my soul. Before I earned a million dollars, and lost it, I worked at Harlem Hospital, where doctors recently calculated that the life expectancy of black men in Harlem was shorter than of men in Bangladesh. There were no statistics to account for what I was at the time and what my life had become. What was I and what was my life? A zombie is a man without a soul.

When I lost my soul, I went into automatic. My life was acted out on a level of deep unconsciousness. I was young in the summer of 1955, when the deal went down, the soul abandoned, and the heart went cold. The next 40 years were spent wandering in a dreamtime of deceptive entertainments. It has been said that if we give time its due phenomenological weight, then most of our life is over by the time we are ten. By that estimate, I got an extra year.

Proust observed that while happiness was good for the body, it was grief that developed the powers of the mind. My childhood was a happy one. It stretches out in memory as a sweet green meadow. Onto this pastoral scene moments of grief rise, each as jagged peaks. They draw the eye. My body grew strong and, yes, so did my mind. My thoughts of that time take the form of puzzle pieces. Some fit, some are not so easily matched, a few are misplaced or perhaps lost forever. The picture of my childhood grows slowly, piece by piece.

San Diego skyline as seen from Coronado, 1958

I arrived in San Diego on a pillow. It was a sweltering hot day in mid-July, and I was three weeks old. My mother had carried me on her lap all the way from New York. My grandfather liked to tell how the train arrived and he took me from my mother’s arms, asleep on my pillowed bed, how life seemed to stop for a moment, and then go on. I was, he said, exactly the size and nearly the same color as one of his brown lace-up shoes.

A trim little man, my grandfather told how he wore that day his best summer suit because it was a special occasion. "My family--with my newest grandson — were coming home.” This was important, but in his story, the part he liked best, I think, was the business of me and his shoe.

My father’s people were fine cooks, my mother came from a line of storytellers. Food for the body. Food for the soul. My mother's grandfather was a coal-black man, plump as a squab, who’d been born a slave. After the Civil War he went to Bible college and married an Indian woman, whose dowry was a milk cow. They traveled from the Kansas township named for her family and moved west, where he built and pastored Beth Fden Baptist Church in Oakland. My great-grandfather took his tales straight from his worn Bible. His more worldly son, my grandfather, would tap his chest and say the best stories come from there, inside. "Grow a big heart," he told me. “That’s the ticket."

The Santa Fe station sat at the foot of Broadway. Inside was a pair of grilled windows, one for tickets, the other for information. High overhead, globes of creamy glass beamed down on high-backed wooden benches facing each other. Hanging on the walls were framed illustrations of Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks. The thick adobe-style walls of the station kept the interior space as cool as the inside of a coconut.

Far off, the train hooted low like an owl at dusk. Wartime sailors spilling out onto the platform, stepping into sunlight in their summer whites, shimmered and flashed like hot grease. A second hoot, closer, and suddenly the great train was on top of them. Huge and slow moving, it glided heavily into the station. On the platform sailors and civilians alike smarted running alongside, craning their necks, dangerously uncaring of the massive iron wheels sluicing along the rails. My grandfather always said that it was then, halfimaging someone falling under the train, that he got the sour taste in his stomach. He'd tap his forehead where the vein made a squiggly line down the temple. “That’s when I thought," he’d add, “that something terrible was going to happen."

Terrible things had already happened — or had been narrowly averted, depending upon how you judged such things. My grandmother had gone back east to help during the last months of my mother’s pregnancy. There, she suffered a heart attack and had to be put in the hospital. Soon after, my brother York, five years older than me and an asthmatic, was rushed to the hospital, unable to catch his breath. An emergency tracheotomy saved his life. Added to this, my mother’s water broke well before the actual delivery. Mine was a long torture called a dry birth. I almost died. "And I wanted to," she said, speaking of the pain.

The train came to a stop with a catch of the air brakes and the clank of metal against metal. Along the train, windows went up and doors flew open, and onto the platform rained duffel bags, foot lockers, luggage tied with rope, food hampers, and steamer trunks plastered with tags and stickers. Red-capped porters moved forward with their dollies. San Diego was a small city then, and the Red Caps, all black men. tipped their brims to my grandfather, addressing him respectfully as “Professor" as they passed. Barbers were always being called on to settle arguments among their customers. Well-read and thoughtful, in points of dispute, my grandfather's word was always the last on any subject. This is how he came to be called Professor.

The Red Caps headed for the back of the train. My grandfather moved toward the front. At the time in the South, blacks were required to sit in the first car, behind the engine, where it was hottest. They could not eat in the dining car nor sleep in the sleepers. Even blacks in the military were handed sandwiches and fruit and made to ride up front, where they sat in the aisle or stood, traded places and slept, packed close. By 1944, while there was no explicit segregation in California, most blacks would be found up toward the front of the train.

My grandfather made his way among the crowd. His stomach, he reported, was twisted into a tight knot. He had not gone far when he saw my grandmother, a tall, pale woman, whom sailors were helping down the steps. She gripped tightly my brother's hand. In the early years of my grandparents' marriage, they would pose together at parties, she majestic in a chair and he small and dapper in her lap, husband and wife as Madonna and Child.

Now, from the nervous drop of her shoulders, it was clear that she had been very ill.

She turned and caught sight of him. "Kitty!” she cried, sharing with the world her pet name for him. He hurried forward. “You’re all right?” he asked, looking from his wife to his grandson. “Where’s Peggy?”

“Here I am!” Sailors held open the glass-and-metal door between cars so that my mother could squeeze sideways onto the platform. The rise between the steps was deep. “Take the baby.” she said, leaning over.

My grandfather reached up, accepting the pillow upon which I lay sleeping. Because of the heat, I wore only a cotton diaper. My grandfather could barely stand for the sudden feelings he felt welling up within. My mother stepped down onto the platform. “Dad, are you all right?” He did not answer but stared down at me. This was, after all, the event he had expected but could not name, terrible in its gift, enormous in its demand: A child's life. A man's love. A family’s safe return. He related how it took him a moment to come to himself.

“No.” he said, “I'll hold him.”

All births are auspicious. Mine, an astrologer once explained, was especially so. June 21 is the point of equinox, the longest day of that year, which, according to the Chinese system, happened to belong to the keenly intelligent and sensitive Wood Monkey. I was born in New York City, the most important of cities in the nation, for which the century itself took its name, the “American Century.” This was the good stuff.

At the time, in St. Vincent’s Hospital it was routine practice to circumcise newborn males. The bad part is that the surgery done on me was badly botched, a ragged cut that left the raw flesh to graft back onto the head of my penis.

I did not play with myself as little boys, left to their own devices, are said to. With adolescence and later, as the member grew, erections painfully stretched the skin. Sex, later, was a special kind of torment. At 28 I went for help.

Hans Schroth had only seen cases with one adhesion before. I had three. “Who did this to you?” he asked, bending close. He was not British, but he spoke with that accent. I was embarrassed with my pants and underwear hanging at my knees. I was also ashamed. On the far wall were framed diplomas inscribed in Latin.

I had studied Latin in high school but could make out only his name. “I should have done something earlier, I guess.” Schroth lifted shaggy eyebrows. “The body accepts what it is as normal. You thought everyone was in the same way hobbled as you?”

“Why didn't the nurses do something?” I said, jumping quickly from shame to anger. I wanted to lay the blame somewhere.

“What about my mother? She saw me naked!”

Schroth shrugged. For him, the operation seemed unnecessary in the first place. “It is not so common in Europe,” he said, “unless you’re Jewish." He smiled. “Are you?”

I underwent recircumcision. The frenulum, a concentration of nerve tissue, was cut away. I was shot with a local anesthetic, spent three days in the hospital, and returned home, where I slept curled up in a sleeping bag for weeks. I had gone into a deep regression. When the stitches were removed, I felt pain unlike any other.

Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, speaks of a secret wound but does not reveal its nature. Henry James litters his fiction with secrets that go unrevealed. Sacred or profane, secrets illuminate texts. My own wound lies revealed here, yet a deeper mystery holds: How had the injury remained untreated for so long? What were the effects of that earliest wound, and how has it found expression? Hobbled. The answers elude.

A silver locomotive. The dark green imprint of a ten-dollar bill. Sunshine passing through glass. A great red rose. A sepia print of a smiling couple. All against a sky of bleached yellow, a dog's-eye color. In my life as a puzzle, portions lay scattered over the wide expanse of memory. I pick up and explore one piece and then another, hoping for a fit.

The photograph of my parents freezes a moment that can, of itself, not stand still. On the right stands a tall and handsome man. He is posed against a railing. He has wavy blue-black hair and a dazzling matinee idol's smile. His suit is well fitted, he stands casually and appears confident and urbane. At his side, peeping at the camera, the woman smiles shyly. She is light skinned, with a broad forehead and a knockout figure hinted at under her two-piece wool suit. He is named for Sergeant York of World War I fame. He grew up in Alabama, 12 miles outside of Birmingham. His people are slow-talking and hard-working. (At 60, his mother will fall out of a tree picking apples for one of her pies.) Peggy, his wife, was born in San Francisco, across the bay from where her grandfather built his church. Her mother was a sensation on-stage with her rendition of a song Fannie Brice made popular, “My Man." Caroline Snowden, her aunt, is already a legend in early black film.

It is in the nature of their gazes that their dreams are revealed. He smiles, staring straight at the camera, for he dreams of conquering his world. (“There's more than one way to skin a cat," he likes to say.) She looks up at him, her dream of someone to love stands answered by her side. Her dream has been answered; his is about to be. Be careful what you dream of (so the proverb goes) for you may have them answered. Harnessing themselves to a red-hot post-World War II economy, together, on the Navy allotment checks he sends home, they will build apartment units and a small retail center on Imperial Avenue. They will buy two homes, and a third they will build, perched like a great bird overlooking El Cajon Valley. They will send their five sons to private school. He will invest wisely and retire once from the Navy and again from his job with the county. Her body will be laid open to surgeons time and again and her health strictly monitored for the last 30 years of her life.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked to comment on the rising rate of divorce. Were people less committed to marriage, more engaged with their individual needs? “The reason," she said, her answer deceptively simple, “is that people are living longer." York and Peggy Mitchell will both live long lives, though separate and never divorcing. They will have made good parents for their children and outlasted their need to be spouses for each other.

I am today old enough to be the father of that young pair in the photograph.

In the puzzle of my life are not just objects, but tastes, smells, feelings, and sounds. I see the bottles of milk left on the front porch three times each week. I know their rounded contours, the deep cream line of the Grade A, the sweet and thick creaminess of the milk itself, the odd and faintly soured odor the milk gave to the lid. I can still feel the wool trousers that bit at my legs like fire ants and made Sunday mornings in church a torture. I hear the Helms Bakery truck drive up with bells ringing and its supply of coconut cookies covered in chocolate that were only baked once a week. I can taste the rich vanilla of Challenge’s ice cream, the tartness of my mother’s peach cobbler, the smoothness of her macaroni and cheese.

I see the spot under the huge pepper tree, under the cascade of branches where we played at recess, and I hear the word “Nigger —!" The word is new to me. I do not as yet know the meaning, but the sound alone lashes the skin and stings like a frond from the pepper tree. Jimmy Campbell hurled the word at me in such a way that I have no doubt “nigger” is meant as an insult. It is because I recognize the intention behind the word that I cry.

Once riding in old Baltimore

Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,

I saw a Baltimorean

Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,

And he was no whit bigger.

And so I smiled, but he poked out

His tongue and called me “Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore

From May until December

Of all the things that happened there

That’s all that I remember.

Having met my own Baltimorean 30 years after Countee Cullen’s eight-year-old met his, I chose a tactic different from the tone of weepy sentimentality and moral ascendancy the poem suggests. Children respect the savage code of an eye for an eye, or at least I did. Having heard that little white boys like Jimmy Campbell didn't like to be called “paddies" (no matter that the only paddy I knew was a hamburger paddy, and so the word seemed slightly ridiculous), I hurled what was at hand like a stone and was not unhappy, I must confess, at drawing the equivalent of blood.

I did not suddenly become a zombie. I lost my soul slowly over time, with a series of little tradeoffs, innocuous at first. These are called life's lessons. I will not cry. I will be nice. I will forgive. I will accept. I will pretend. These were the lies I learned to tell myself as the world of convention and symbol replaced my child’s world of immediacy. It took a while, and in the meantime I’d pick up a smooth rock and lick it because the sun's heat had released from it an odor as mysteriously suggestive as that of baking bread. If my father watered the lawn in the evening, water falling on pavement and dampening it gave off a delectable odor that made my nostrils open wide and my scalp itch. I wanted to eat that smell.

The German lady who sold my parents our first home had planted a wonderful garden. One rose (an old tea rose called “L’Etoile de Hollande") climbed a trellis but always dropped its petaled face down to me. I'd stick my nose in the center of that fragrant red cabbage and blank out, drunk on its perfume. We'd open our windows on summer nights, because somewhere on 19th Street, in some unseen yard, the petals of a night-blooming jasmine were opening. Today, each morning, I burn imported incense, but none has the exquisite fragrance of the snapdragons, sweet peas, and stock that grew in our back yard. Down the block I'd tear at the branches of a eucalyptus tree, then crush the leaves and smell my palm. The odor of eucalyptus took my breath away. We’d beg men tarring the streets to give us some of their tar. It was tasteless stuff, with a rubbery texture and slight petroleum odor I associate with mornings of early summer, when the men did their tarring, before it got too hot. Chewing on tar was like eating a part of the summer day.

San Diego offers up a special scent, sometimes subtle yet ubiquitous. It flavors all others. I came to the smell of ocean when I was four.

My mother and Miss Becky were best friends since grade school. She was a short, feisty woman with amber-colored eyes, a generous laugh, and a bad mouth. “People are a pain in the butt," she’d say in response to any display of black bourgeoisie pretension. “Now Beck —!” My mother would caution her, eyeing me. “Well, they are!" She’d look to me, seeking a confederate. “Aren't they?”

Miss Becky’s mother had not married the father of her various children, and she, the daughter, had inherited her mother's high-spirited willfulness. She liked to dance and sing and play cards; but what she loved best was camping out and sleeping under the stars. It was Miss Becky who arranged for us to camp overnight on La Jolla beach.

In the early ’30s, my grandparents hired themselves out for the private parties given in that privileged community. She served food; he fixed drinks. The money was good, as were the tiny sandwiches and delicate French pastries they were allowed to take home. But my grandparents were always anxious, and when their duties were complete, they left at once, never pausing to gaze at the scenic shoreline. At the time, throughout La Jolla, signs were posted that read, “Niggers and Stray Dogs. Keep Out.”

We arrived after sunset. The great blast of ocean air smacked me full in the face and took my breath away the moment I stepped out of the car. But the water was dark, the breaking waves a sudsy line. I would have no sense of that titanic element I was breathing in until early the next morning. Our mothers at once set to getting a fire going while York and Howard, Miss Becky's son, both at the same advanced age of nine, told me to get lost. They dropped to their knees and began furiously to dig with both hands, like dogs for a bone. They were going to dig straight down to China, and I, they said, was in the way.

I got to tend the fire.

On the grill the hot dogs grew plump, their skin broke, and juices ran. Cobs of com baked in aluminum foil. My favorite drink was grape Fizzies (fruit-flavored tablets that dissolved in water, turning it purple or orange, red or lime green), but I think Fizzies came later. We probably drank milk. I remember that there was potato salad, still a little warm, with plenty of eggs and lots of Best Foods real mayonnaise.

After dinner we were put to bed. In the tent, the older boys whispered about how — as soon as everyone was asleep — they’d sneak back out and continue their digging.

“What's China?" I asked. I remember picking up handfuls of the nighttime sand. In the dark, it was cold and fine like water running through my fingers. Through the tent flap, far off, stars were shining. Nearer, waves broke, one after another....

The next thing I knew, it was morning. I crept over the others and out the tent and...! Shrouded in darkness of night before, the ocean now lay*exposed in a silvery mist of early morning. Of the ocean's utter immensity, words will forever fail. The water and the deserted beach were way too big to take in. I focused on the scattered clumps of stringy black-green seaweed, and farther off, sea gulls that swooped and dropped like handkerchiefs falling. Then I remembered and ran forward looking for the hole York and Howard had dug the night before. What I found was no more than a foot or so deep and not very wide. I knelt, taking a deep breath, and stuck my face inside the hole.

Held in the damp sand more than the air itself was the smell: ocean. The odor, as big as the ocean itself, was as difficult to describe. Yet when reduced to a sandy hole, I could take it in, domesticated, compact. The cold commingling of fish and kelp, salt and sand, distilled over a hundred thousand millennia, that I breathed in and made mine. Today, when I am on a beach and see a hole or come across serious children digging with their hands or using pails and shovels, I give to that moment when I first smelled ocean the image of the fabled city of Marco Polo with its rare silks, golden pagodas, and unyielding mystery: China.

Rimbaud says a poet makes himself wise by a long and deliberate derangement of all the senses. This may help to explain why I am a writer and not a wise poet, for my derangement was not deliberate. Early on, all my senses were intact. Yet within hours of my birth, under conditions not of my doing, I was maimed and in time made into a creature no longer able to see, hear, or speak of the world as it was.

One Christmas Eve my father's ship, the USS Prairie, docked in the harbor following a tour of duty in Japan. The timing couldn't have been better. As we went to bed. Dad asked what we'd think of ponies under the tree the next day. Of course not — no! Delirious with the thought, York and I could barely sleep. “Wild Fire" — I had my name already picked out. Christmas morning. We jumped out of bed and ran into the living room. But instead of my pony and York’s, parked next to the Christmas tree were a pair of shiny ten-speed Japanese racing bikes. “What about the ponies?” For a moment my disappointment threatened to suck up all the air. My breath caught as children's do when they are about to cry. But I did not cry. Instead, I exhaled, and the tree and gifts that threatened to dissolve in tears of watery disorder stayed put.

We jumped on our new bikes and flew down L Street, dumb . to the fact that Japanese racers do not have foot brakes. “The hand brakes! Use the hand brakes!" my father yelled, running after us.

We scraped our heels on the street but couldn't stop. York acted first and slammed into a tree. I made a direct hit with a utility pole at the corner, leaving the rest of that holiday morning spent knocking out dents and unbending handle bars and the pretty phantom ponies to forever gambol in the grassy pastures of unrequited longing.

Christmas was toys. Halloween was a pillowcase full of candy and an 8:30 curfew. On the Fourth of July, we stepped onto the back porch and watched Dad point his revolver in the air and fire away six times. Easter was new clothes and painted hard-boiled eggs. Except for Thanksgiving, we celebrated the holidays as my friends did. On that most American of holidays, however, we acted like no one else I knew.

At one time Thanksgiving was my grandmother's chance to annually outdo herself. She’d put out her best silver, drape the table with her finest linen, spoon out two kinds of cranberry sauce, serve Parker House rolls with the turkey. However, after her heart attack in New York, her weakened heart reduced the flow of blood to the brain (we learned after her death), and she grew increasingly absent-minded. I remember sitting at the table on a pair of telephone books the last time we had turkey for Thanksgiving. Grandma stuffed the turkey but forgot to remove the neck, gizzard, and other internal organs the butcher had placed inside the bird. When the turkey, gorgeously browned, was duly set before my grandfather for carving, and the bloody and inedible stuffing spooned out, he threw down his carving knife and long fork. “That’s it!" he announced. “That's it!"

The next year, and each holiday until 1962, when she died, we celebrated Thanksgiving at a Chinese restaurant downtown on Fifth Avenue. At the time, not all restaurants were willing to serve blacks, but this one was. Here in a private room with walls painted jade green, behind a beaded curtain that jibbered and clacked each time the waiters passed through with steaming plates, we feasted on egg foo yung, snow-drop soup, and Mandarin duck. And always over the fortune cookies, my father and grandfather squabbled over who picked up the check. “Thanksgiving is mine!" Grandpa would say, finally, slapping down his money, and end the matter. "If you want to pay, pick another holiday for yourself.”

At our last Thanksgiving together before Grandma died and I left home for college, the narrow white slip in my fortune cookie read, "You have an interest in all things artistic." My father wanted me to study to be a social worker. According to him, as there would always be poor people. I’d never want for work. Following the same reasoning, Murr (child's-speak for “mother”) suggested I look into mortuary science.

“Over a little." Murr was measuring with her eye. My father moved as instructed until IT was dead center in front of the never-used fireplace. The tufted sofa, the green wool rug, the dark wainscotting, the inlaid leaded-glass cabinets, the mirrors — even before IT was turned on, IT dominated the living room as the focal point. The radio, a distant cousin, sat near the easy chair. Its hour was over. Television had arrived.

My earliest memory belongs to the radio. When it was first delivered to our home, I remembering licking its smooth veneer. I was toothing and used my front teeth to scrape over the wooden lip of the console. I let the taste of varnished wood bloom in my mouth, a taste experienced only this once, but as familiar today as the recalled taste of grape

jelly and peanut butter on white Langendorf bread. I feasted. Scraping my new teeth over the varnished lip, I felt tremors run from the roof of my mouth throughout my head and body, offering my nervous system the same thrill I suppose rats in research labs enjoy when they press on a lever that sends an electrical current to the brain.

“You were too young to know what you were doing," my mother said, speaking of her response when she came upon me. “And too young to whip. I could only cry.”

I recall that the radio was delicious.

The Great Gildersleeve Red Rider. Lamont Cranston as “The Shadow." Captain Midnight. The Lone Ranger. Sprawled on the floor, my brothers and I listened and picked up from the speech inflections and pitch as much as from the words the compass points of a moral universe, of right and wrong, of justice that inevitably follows upon the occurrence of evil.

Television was like that too, but it was also different. For one thing, it placed greater demands on our time. York and I rushed through our task of washing and drying the dishes so that we could plop down in front of the set My grandparents liked to visit on Sunday evening. We’d scoop out portions from the half-gallon of strawberry-chocolate-and- vanilla Neapolitan ice cream they brought, and over dessert we’d chitchat. After the TV came, however, they knew to arrive before 7:00, when the set went on. Conversation more or less died at that hour.

Grandma sat with my parents. The sofa was an overstuffed, sculpted affair, big like an open hand and tufted along the back. The upholsters-fabric showed huge green-and-yellow leaves and made the three of them look to be sitting in the bower of a banana tree. My grandfather took the easy chair, where he liked to nod off.

My parents live apart now. My mother has two TV sets in her two-bedroom apartment. My father has three in his house, one operated by a remote control capable of picking up nearly a hundred channels and displaying several programs on the screen at once. A computer controls the rotating dish that looks like something Buster Crabbe's Flash Gordon might have stumbled upon in l)r. Zarkotf s lab. The apple does not fall far from the tree. A TV junkie gone cold turkey, I followed the instructions cited on certain bumper stickers: Kill Your Television.

Yet who would have guessed? Those first talking images of unremarkable middle aged men in crew cuts and boxy Brooks Brothers suits, sexless glamour girls in shirtwaist dresses, puppets and clowns, animals stuffed into costumes, commercials for Lucky Strike cigarettes and General Electric appliances, all sometimes evaporating on-screen or moving in triplicate when bad reception hit — it all seemed innocuous enough. Freckled Arthur T. Godfrey with his laconic style, fey lack Benny eternally 39 with his violin, toothy Milton Berle in drag, Edward R. Murrow smoking like a chimney, and neckless Ed Sullivan with his offer of a “really big shew tonight” — we welcomed them into our home like neighbors. Only one “shew” did not quite fit.

The cronies in Amos 'n Andy looked like people we knew and sounded a little like them too, but if I closed my eyes and listened to Amos’s deep belly tones, the way Kingfish chopped up language, or his wife Satire turkey-gobbled her words, I heard a warning signal: Do Not Enter. The children of immigrants are trained to speak as if members of their newly adopted society. We were the greatgrandchildren of slaves, the grandchildren and children of lim Crowed Negroes. We pitched our voices higher in the throat and gave a smart lick to the ends of words, as whites did. And of course this was not only about how we spoke; it was what we spoke of. Instead of the clownish patter on the show, the transplanted metaphors of country people, we were practicing the faster rat-tat-tat of urban patois.

We ate broccoli and salad rather than mustard greens floating in pot likker, roast beef instead of pork chops, a hefty slice of sweet potato pie was replaced with a piece of fruit. The very word “watermelon" had the power to shame us. We drank our soup by pushing the spoon away. Chitlins, pork rings, ears, and pig feet were replaced by bacon, ham, and sausage. Because we were not burdened by the heavy soul food (nor the hard work and limited wages that made such a diet necessary), we moved our bodies like city folk, quicker and with a less weighty grace. We did not open our mouths so wide when we laughed, and we did not laugh so much.

We talked more and filled our silences like potholes in the road, so that we might travel easily, assured of no surprises, no bumps. If in our speeded-up world it was natural that we should be quicker to judge and, in our haste, less generous in our judgments, well, at least we could not be accused of that most dreaded of sins: acting country.

Country was what a million blacks who'd migrated north were getting away from. Country was what Amos and Andy, despite their city ways, were guilty of being. Country was to be foolish, suckered. an easy mark. It was the Achilles' heel that brought the shoeless darkie down. Country was how you talked, what you said, how you dressed and treated your relations. Country bounded dreams and circumscribed achievement. (My mother, a native San Franciscan, always said that San Diego was country.) If one of the qualities of black culture is its celebration of a sleek urbanity, then (by definition) country had none.

“He likes to read,” Grandpa would announce. I loved being inside the Manhattan. The barbershop was always dimly lit and cooler than outdoors. The sweet fragrances of rosewater and talc bathed the air. There was the heavy horsehide leather of razor straps and the shiny chrome of the barber's chairs. The wall of reflecting mirrors caught the eye, and the old men’s stories that so often ended in laughter were easy on the ear. If I waited, my grandfather usually gave me a dime for a soda at Bruno's, on the corner.

“Is that so," the men would murmur. I’d flush under the heat of their admiring gazes; and I would wait. And always the question would come, “And are you going to grow up to be a credit to your race?" And of course I nodded, not quite knowing what it meant to be a credit to my race, but by then accepting as a given that each prize I might win, each good quality I might express, whether it be willingness to run an errand or the pleasure I took in reading, reflected not just on myself or my family, but on all Negroes. After all, white-sheeted members of the Ku Klux Klan photographed rallying around a blazing cross were known to still ride at night, seeing that the repressive Jim Crow laws, like a great dike, held back the putrid waters of miscegenation and niggerish uppitiness that threatened to destroy the American democracy. There was much to be done, and I must go far (and always here sounded the unspoken warning) — but not too far — for great achievement singled one out, and this could prove dangerous. Men had been murdered for no other reason than they had made themselves conspicuous. Black folks believed then (if they do not still now) that just as a hungry animal needs feeding, when killing-time came, a victim had to be found somewhere. It was not wise to get noticed. Perhaps it is for this reason that gestures in public were stylized, the living features hidden behind a mask, like characters in Japanese kabuki.

I saw a black man sprawled in the gutter on Imperial Avenue, clutching an empty bottle of cheap Thunderbird. He was a wino and I felt bad for him. “He’s not in your family, is he?" my mother asked, trying to help me see that I need take no responsibility for this stranger. And of course he was not, but how could I explain my complicated feelings? On the one hand I was urged to achieve yet warned against pride, trained to seek advancement yet cautioned of the dangers of being singled out, applauded as a young leader of the race who was to act as servant and, at the same time, told I was responsible for no one besides myself and my family. Conflicting messages that produced shame and guilt, pride and fear, that mixed country ways with city smarts. (Drowning in a sea of contradictions, at 14 I would ask to see the first of a long line of psychologists, all well trained and sympathetic, and all white men.)

At the time, adults were addressed by children and each other as Mr. Smith, Mrs. Waters, or Miss Simpson. It was not so much age but graduation through life's various stages (which advanced age implied) that was recognized and respected. While Southern blacks (country folk) had the most subtle distinctions in addressing each other, we all learned the rudiments. In my grandfather's barbershop, adults addressed each other by an honorific Reverend or Doctor and, if there was no other handle, simply by their family name. Distinctions of intimacy were held by suggesting blood relationship, when in fact often there was none: Father Clarence or Brother Phipps. On the other hand, rules regarding the addressing of whites were less distinguished and more encompassing. "Sir" and “Ma'am” would always do. (In our family this was deemed servile. We used names or nothing.)

Technically, naming did not have much to do with what is called “country," nor was it simply the expression of good manners. Learning what might be said and how best to say it was of the utmost importance. A voice was as much a shield as a face was a mask. Both, when properly used, could secure favor or, if need be, save your life. In the same way, an impertinent gaze, a gesture read as defiant, an overheard remark, any of these might spell trouble.

“Watch your mouth!" our mothers warned.

In 1955, in Mississippi, a 14-year-old boy failed to heed his mother’s warning. He was murdered for not knowing when to leave off city ways. What happened to him changed my life.

When York hit 15, he turned into a hoodlum. He wore his hair in a DA. His Levi's hung low. He nailed furniture taps into the bottoms of shoes and spit-polished the tops to an unreal shine. He wasn't Mexican, so he couldn't be a real pachuco. but he was close. He slouched, carried a switchblade with a pearl handle, smoked cigarettes, rolled the sleeves of his T-shirts up over his biceps, and doused himself with Old Spice when he went to see Olivia, an olive-skinned Mexican girl with a river of dark hair running down her back. She was so beautiful that I could not bear to look directly at her. When they broke up, York cried, and so did I.

Your poor young things

when they are once in the teens

think that they shall never be married.

William Wycherley penned this earliest recorded reference to teenagers in 1673. When York and Olivia broke up nearly three centuries later, top-ten hits like “Hey, There" and “Three Coins in a Fountain" confirmed that young people still had failed romance on their minds.

It was at about this time that my mother enrolled us in the Jack and Jill Club. Forced to clean up his act, York got rid of his slouch, the switchblade, and the DA as we attended all manner of age-related activities. I went to dance class, where I was taught the box step; wore my itchy wool trousers and sports jacket to hear the famous contralto Marian Anderson, whose first booming notes emitted from that wide horsey mouth sent us into gales of laughter that could not be stopped. At the Old Globe in Balboa Park we watched Heidi, the story of a blond pigtailed girl dressed in a dirndl. We oohed and aahed the display at the Museum of Man in Balboa Park that testified to Aztec sacrifice, lack and 131 introduced us to what culture San Diego had to offer. And what the city could not offer, pageants, and musicales, and moments of exquisite boredom were privately devised.

Through this matrilineal and highly selective club, each month York would go off with the teens, me with the preteens, and Marcus with the children eight to ten. Well dressed with shoes shined, our good-looking group of well-behaved Negro kids would be taken somewhere to watch or listen, eat or move. We bowled, sang Christmas carols, collected canned goods for the needy, and if what we did together was not really much fun (mostly because we shared only that our mothers had brought us together), membership had the advantage of allowing us to feel superior to anyone who was not in Jack and fill. Admission was based on three criteria. Parents should be college-educated and/or the family middle class. The family should be well-known in the community, a “good" family (we scored highest here). The third criterion, unstated but implied by the first two, was whiteness: “good" hair, light skin, and keen features. In the '50s, middle-class blacks had the comer on whiteness.

Historically, this tyranny of looks had a practical aspect. The more white-appearing the Negro, the more open were possibilities for employment, education, etc This caste system based on color, a carryover from slavery, held that producing lighter and lighter children was the responsibility of each of us. It was called “improving the race." And for those so improved as to have achieved a look pale enough to pass into the land of anonymous whiteness, the feelings of betrayal and jealousy experienced by those left on the other side were matched by an acknowledgement that the temptation, if it were given them, would be a hard one to ignore. Color consciousness is still firmly in operation today. The rhyme continues to apply. “If you're white, you’re all right. If you’re brown, stick around. If you’re black, get back." As the darkest of the three oldest Mitchell boys, I was still only the medium-brown tone of a man’s lace-up shoe. We got to stick around.

It was in my first year on automatic pilot that I was selected to recite at the lack and Jill Mother’s Day pageant. Mine was the closing statement, a tong rhymed poem written by Mrs. Tina Bledsoe. I worked hard memorizing the piece and, the night before the pageant, threw up. (Since the summer before, I’d been plagued with what the doctors called a “nervous stomach.")

“You’ll be fine," my mother soothed.

There was no stage with its advantage of distance from the audience. Instead I was plunked down in the center of a nondescript church hall ringed by a great crowd sitting on creaky wooden chairs, who stared at me with eyes of radiant expectation. Even working on automatic, I jammed. That is to say, the entire poem, from first word to last, flew straight out of my head. While I stood transfixed, feet crossed-snd uncrossed, chairs scraped. I heard the rustle of the single-sheeted mimeographed program. There were spots of good-humored snickering. In the middle of this, a pinching pain seized me at the groin. I knew what it was.

Mrs. Bledsoe, whose immense breasts made her head look tiny by comparison, leaned forward in her chair and whispered, “Mothers —!"

I heard but did not at first understand.

She hissed again. “Mothers are —!"

I repeated, “Mothers are..." and stopped.

Three heartbeats, and she went on. “Special —!" she said. "Mothers are special in so many ways.”

I repeated the line, and waited.

And so it went for the next three lines, until Mrs. Bledsoe, voicing apologies, from her seat (for she was said to be shy about her top-heavy figure) recited her poem while I remained in place, frozen in the center. I knew it was over with the applause. I took my seat.

The pain in my groin was the effect of an erection, like the nervous stomach, painful erections had begun the summer before.

In the poem of my life is a white stucco house. It still stands on 19th and L streets. The house was custom built in the Craftsman style, with the living room paneled in cedar wood that gave off a faintly sweet and musky odor. The glassed-in patio no longer holds the moss and fern that I remember. There was an expansive garden in the back, with a goldfish pond neatly set on a double lot onto which my parents would later build a four-unit apartment house. Purchased at a whopping $2000 in 1941, my grandparents partitioned off their home on Imperial Avenue, rented to lodgers, and moved in with my parents to help pay the bank note.

Still standing today, the two-bedroom house has served as witness to the changing culture of the city. My parents bought the property from a German woman who spoke an immigrant tongue. At that time the house stood within a white enclave. My first friend was Tommy. His pink skin was so sensitive that he got boils all over his back when he played in the sun. He and his family were among those not too old, too tired, or too poor to flee to higher ground. Taking their place was rickety-stick Miss Boswell, who was whispered to practice voodoo; Mr. Marzan, who made a Filipino dish of candied rice, and Mr. Gonzalez, who all day sat on his porch, under his wide-brimmed straw hat, and whittled little toy horses. San Diego, the city and the county, was a network of communities stitched together by codes, covenants, and restrictions. Not all were based on color.

Joe and Rhoda Gheiten were easygoing people who knew the value of a good meal and a good laugh. They used their savings to fix up an old diner in El Cajon. “A good neighborhood that was," Joe recounted later, his speech made quaint by loose dentures and Lithuanian accent “There was people walking, taking their time, taking it easy, walking the streets." In Sandy’s Cafe (named after their daughter), Joe cooked while Rhoda, in front, schmoozed with the customers. The cafe did well, and when they closed for the Jewish holy days, leaving a note to that effect taped to the window, they had reason to look forward to the New Year, which happened to be, according to the Jewish calendar, 5719.

The window on which the note had been taped was smashed. On the door was a swastika painted with whitewash. This is what they found in the early morning when they drove up a few days later. They used hot soapy water and scrub brushes and cleaned what they could. The rest, they decided, would have to wait. They heated the grill, put on the coffee, and awaited their customers. But the customers never returned. They took a beating when they sold.

In 1957 we moved to our second home near National City. I returned to the L Street house three decades later and found the area was now Latino, from the bay all the way up to Imperial Avenue. When I was young, immigration had not been so pressing an issue. The city was not so crowded, its citizens not so urbanized. In the next block, a rooster strutted and crowed, waking the neighborhood as it called up the morning. Around the corner was a hutch of soli rabbits, and just outside the city, less than half an hour away, Dr. Jackson had a hog farm that stank to high heaven and over which swarmed a sea of black flies. We visited there once, passing city trucks that dumped their load of garbage into huge pens, where hogs, half as big as cars, shit and gobbled and ate and trampled the mess into a gray-colored swill.

Marcus and I each raised a couple of yellow Faster chicks. As an altar boy. I'd taken to Latin. I named my chicks Jesu and Christe. If it is true that we love what we suffer for, then I surely loved Jesu and Christe for all that was required of me to keep the back yard free of all the chicken shit they dropped.

My mother drove us out to see our new home on Keeler Avenue. We were excited when we came back, ready to move that very day. We noticed the back yard was empty. It was Marcus who asked, “Where are the chickens?"

“They’re in the freezer," my father announced.

I’d already watched my grandfather wring chicken’s necks. I’d seen them run headless, blood spurting, wings flapping, raising dust until they keeled over. In our absence, my father had killed, cleaned, and deposited our pets in the freezer. There was no sign of blood or feathers anywhere. Still I knew how they’d died and was horror-struck.

“I’m never going to eat chicken again,” I swore. But by the time my mother made chicken and dumplings, I’d forgotten my oath. Chickens are utterly anonymous when they are a part of chicken and dumplings, so I did not know if I was eating Jesu or Christe. Nor would it have much mattered. One of the operating rules at the dinner table was “You eat what’s put in front of you.”

My parents were not sadists. My father grew up on a farm where dogs fetched cattle and cats killed verminous rats, where pets were animals first, and animals did a job just like people. Our chickens could not have come with us to our new home. Besides, their work was done, Jesu and Christe's job, as it turned out, was to grow up and get eaten.

My parents were not unkind. That early photograph shows them for what they were as young lovers, dreamers hungry for life. But as parents they felt the need to act as violently as the forces that threatened their children. “I always wanted a lot of children,'* Murr said, "in case I lost one." Today the leading cause of death among black males between 15 and 24 is homicide. In my childhood things were different, but it has never been easy for the black male. Each of us had to be prepared for a world where, if we were to survive and prosper, we’d have to beat the odds. It helped that we'd been trained to a middle-class ethic.

A sociologist once explained that three generations are required to fully establish membership in the middle class but that among blacks the rise to that relatively race-neutral class state did, itself, take on a particularly African-American character. It was not so clean and white-shirted as our white American counterpart. My great-grandparents stumbled out of slave huts, walked away from cotton fields, departed Indian reservations, and fled European famine. Pitching themselves headlong into hardworking respectability, they thrived, and their children, my grandparents, held firm during the Great Depression so that in a fortunate confluence of middle-class ethic and a roaring post-war economy, their children, my parents, were able to cement matters.

When my father went into the Navy, though he was strong and smart and a high school graduate, he was assigned, like all blacks at the time, to cooking or cleaning. In World War I, black troops were not allowed to carry weapons. It was feared that if black soldiers got a taste of shooting up white folks, when they returned home there would be hell to pay. Dad cooked in the galley, cut hair, and bartered goods.

“There's more than one way to skin a cat,” he’d say.

When he was not on-board ship, he worked in the yard, on the house, or went on with the never-ending maintenance of his rental properties. My mother managed the property when he was away and saw to a household that in time included seven. At the same time, my grandfather stood all day, cutting hair sometimes for 14 hours straight — “two bits a trim.” Next door Grandma was washing her clothes by hand, bluing her sheets, heating her rugs, cooking, cleaning, and being kept company by her favorite radio soap. As the World Turns. Not long before I was born. Grandma had worked as a hotel maid.

Blacks were not welcomed as guests in the better places downtown like the Grant Hotel. However, like stage hands in a theater piece, behind the scenes they kept things going. They were in the kitchens cooking, in the laundries washing and ironing. They worked as janitors, porters, and maids. And because they were in contact with the hotel guests, jobs as maids and porters went first to those who looked most white. My grandmother had no difficulty getting a job. Her problem lay in keeping it.

Wheeling her housewares cart at a sprinter’s pace down long, carpeted halls upon which were hung small gilt-framed paintings, twilight views of Lake Como, the Black Sea, an3 the Danube, she’d rap smartly on a door and, if there was no answer, burst into the room and at once throw open the windows. While the room aired, she'd rip into the bed, tearing at the sheets, exchanging them and remaking the bed. She vacuumed and dusted (and if the room had a bath) scoured the toilet and cleaned the sink, exchanged the towels, scrubbed the bathtub, and mopped the floor. Making a mental note of carpet stains and cigarette burns, she closed the windows, set the blinds, fixed the drapes, and got out, locking the door behind her — all within 15 minutes! Stalking the halls, my grandmother's supervisor, an unsmiling man with brilliantined hair combed straight back, kept a score sheet on her progress with a stopwatch and clipboard in hand. Working with women ten years younger than herself, this breakneck pace wore down my grandmother’s nerves, strained her muscles, and finally gave her heart its erratic beat. One day when she sat down and could not get up, the manager replaced her with another light-skinned colored woman.

My people set their lives to prove a kind of mathematical postulate between the relationship of labor, recompense, and personal desire, which, for them, had mostly to do with security. Setting up life as a one-to-one relationship, they might have written their mathematics like this: Work = $$$ = Security. It belongs in my puzzle with money (MS) the potent force in the postulate. My family were good citizens, but as members of a minority, they only believed so much in the American work ethic. Hard work, they knew, might only get them so far. What they did fully embrace was that money talked, that lack of it was a kind of disease, a leprosy that made one unclean, an untouchable. And we, as children, were sufficiently inoculated against the disease. Yet we saw, going backwards in time with each receding generation, haunting moments when the ethic failed, when the equation did not work out, when money lied.

When Disneyland first opened, for example, we begged to go, but there was not extra money for the trip. “If we eat beans for the next two months," Murr said, figuring expenses, “well save enough to spend a weekend there." Having set upon this dietary means of skinning the cat, there followed an onslaught of red beans and white navy, lima beans, spotted pinto, and black beans glimmering like jet beads in water. We ate beans over rice and beans over cornbread. We ate beans that were refried and beans stuffed in tortillas. We ate soup made of beans. We ate beans with fatty pork thrown in. Indeed, we ate beans every day for the next 60 days (and developed a lifelong aversion for the fatty green lima), and in late August, utterly sick of beans and just before school opened, we set off for Anaheim.

We laugh now recalling how we missed the turnoff and never made it to Disneyland, but at the time we were heartbroken. We had the money but still we got lost.

My father had the money too. When he retired from the Navy after more than 30 years, he bought himself a new 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville that would, with its torpedo taillights and giant shark fins, become a classic example of American excess. Dad drove his new car onto the lot at his new job with the county. His boss, who drove a Ford, had him fired. “The white man doesn't want to see the black man get anything," he said. To the next job (which he would hold for 20 years and retire as supervisor), he drove a pickup truck.

Two generations back includes my great-uncle Bill, who lived in Los Angeles. He was my grandfather's brother, a severely disabled man with one leg four inches shorter than the other, a useless right arm, and a harelip. Uncle Bill was a stubborn man who, though warned, continued to smoke in bed. “Sons of bitches,” he'd blubber, for he hated the world for his disability. One evening his mattress caught fire, and the house quickly went up in flames. Uncle Bill made it out to the street; but then, as the fire engines came screaming down La Cicnega, he rushed back inside. Overcome by smoke, he died on the kitchen floor, in front of the refrigerator. Inside, in the freezer compartment under the ice tray, it was found he'd hidden his Social Security money. Frozen assets.

Finally, three generations back, there is Uncle Bill’s mother, my great-grandmother, a sleepv-faced Blackfoot Indian woman who was called Mother Hawkins. Ten years before she died, she suffered a stroke that left her unable to speak. Her right side paralyzed, her right hand slowly curled into a clenched fist. Mother Hawkins was like this, half paralyzed, until she died. Her daughters laid her out for dressing. When they opened the hand that had been closed in a fist for a decade, they found, dyed into her palm, the dark green imprint of a ten-dollar bill. The money, now long disintegrated, she'd held in secret against some unknown and future need.

Money, that vital middle factor in the American equation, failed to protect us from disappointment or racism. Money drew down death. In the puzzle of my life, a ten-dollar bill lies painted into an old woman's useless palm. Money as a thing apart, as valued items of commercial exchange, became, in the end, painted onto the flesh.

Using a No. 1 needle, my mother worked four months (and afterwards was forced to wear glasses) in order to finish a full-length, mustard-colored dress with long sleeves and wide bands of maroon, green, and blue color running around the shawl collar and hem. She once patched together a dress with a flaring skirt and bodice made of large red cowboy handkerchiefs, each then covered in a pattern of rhinestones individually attached with a hand press. Vogue magazine offered her inspiration until I learned French; then she moved on to Elle. My father smoked a pipe and weekly played a mean round of golf. My grandfather, because of his size, always ordered tailor-made suits. My grandmother, because of her slim arches, required well-made, expensive shoes. My family were city folk with country wisdom.

“Have you had a b.m. today," Grandma would ask. Regularity, as far as she was concerned, was the key to health. Maintaining her own, she ate prunes stewed, dried, or fresh from the box, raisins, and dates. Long before the health craze, she swallowed bee pollen and daily drank glassfuls of Osterized carrot juice. Occasionally Grandma got sad, for she suffered from undiagnosed depression. Her mother, a small woman who had married a 300-pound “yaller" man, underwent a deeply disruptive menopause that left her to walk the streets of Oakland in her nightgown, her hair undone, carrying a loaded revolver. The Snowden blood brought with it not only looks and talent but a susceptibility to low-grade madness known as eccentricity. On my father’s side, his brother Mel came out of the war with shell shock and spent the rest of his life in and out of V.A. hospitals. But for the most part, then, like now, illness was often approached through a regular catalog of old wives' diet urns; An apple a day keeps the doctor away, feed a cold and starve a fever, and so on.

My grandfather popped Tums for his tummy, took a Carter's Little Liver Pill when he was feeling sluggish, and every once in a while drank down a shot glass of whiskey for his low blood pressure. My brothers and I breathed in steaming bowls of mentholated Vicks; we swallowed it and had it rubbed on our chests. When I got a ringworm on my cheek, a penny soaked in vinegar cleared my skin. We drank dark brown castor oil and chalky pink Milk of Magnesia. We gagged on clear and tasteless cod liver oil that went down slowly and left a disgusting oily aftertaste. And once, when things got especially backed up, Marcus and I were each taken into the bathroom, laid over my mother's knee, and given an enema that is today still spoken of in tones of muted horror.

My childhood was played out on three fronts. Adults saw one side. Other kids saw another. A third aspect was recorded privately and stored deep in memory. For example. I'd get permission to go bike riding (“Don’t go far!"), then head with my friends to B Street hill, where we taunted each other (“What are you, a girl?”) until we each had flown down it headlong, no hands. What memory holds were the feelings, systematically played out. of need and deceit, excitement and terror, of relief and exaltation. These were rites of passage.

With Lindsay, I stuck pins under the top layer of skin, gave Indian burns, and used magnifying glasses to burn holes in my palm. I ran races with Jacob and went exploring with his brother Bill. We watched from the sidelines as helmeted kids (white kids, of course) seated deep inside their model cars sped their way to glory and immortality in the Soap Box Derby. Then Bill sneaked some photographs from his father's shoeshine kit of naked couples explicitly posed. Our interests were changing because our bodies were. “Put them back." I generalized from the feelings of my body where pain instead of pleasure came with each hard-on. “You should put them back,” I said. My friends saw no reason to. We stopped playing together.

“You see my grandson sittin' over there?" my grandfather would ask, pointing at me with his scissors when the men’s stories threatened to get out of hand. I had little more than a clue of what lay behind the bits of gossip they traded or the tales they told. What I heard mostly was the looping cadence, the unfurling of their voices, the sweet silences that fell away with their calls of “Do tell! Do tell!"

One of the things I learned about black people came from overhearing those old men in my grandfather’s barbershop: We have a hundred ways of laughing. There was a gleeful laugh for the crazy ways of. say, children, a head-shaking laugh at the mystery of women, wide-mouthed guffaws at someone's country ways. For the machinations of white folks, there was a bitter laugh that hurt the ears, like fingernails scraping across a chalkboard. In recounting the habits of someone who had passed on, there was sad laughter that was only sad at the end. when it trailed off like the ends of a soft ribbon used to tie a gift. There was mean laughter between enemies and sweet laughter between friends, old-man laughter and ridiculing laughter, silly and serious and wise laughter. In the barbershop, I’d be reading through a stack of magazines, scanning quickly or reading more slowly, not really listening to the conversation when suddenly someone would laugh and, hearing it. I’d catch the kernel of what had just been said.

Mr. Sauls, Mr. Brown, and Mr. Cartwell were regulars to the shop. Their jackets and hats off, their ties loosed, suspenders dropped and belts undone, they might take a shave or sit for a trim, but for the most part they spent their day looking out the window, trading gossip about those who passed by, and awaiting customers to the shop who, in sharing news, would invite their comments and finally and always draw forth their laughter.

Mr. Sauls smoked a cigar and sat nearest the toilet “in case of surprises.” Mr. Cartwell stood on the left near the mirrored wall so that he could see people coming as well as going down the block. He was a short-tempered man with brown freckles who spoke in a singsong West Indian accent that Harry Belafonte was yet to make famous. Mr. Brown was on the right, always leaning next to the Sparkletts water cooler. He had a round, oily black face with wisps of kinky white hair that grew straight up from his head. Once Mr. Cartwell called Mr. Brown an old black smudge pot. Mr. Brown's jaw dropped and his tongue showed as purple as a plum. When he caught his voice, he let forth with a swarm of insults that began with "You long-tailed Jamaican monkey...."

“Don't you see there's a child sittin' over there?” my grandfather sang out.

“See there!” said Mr. Cartwell, his color splotched, his freckles muddied. The fun of calling Mr. Brown a smudge pot was, I think, lost quickly in the image of himself as a long-tailed monkey. “Look what a fool you be makin' before the face of that boy.”

Mr. Brown put the brakes on. Struggling to control himself, he took a breath. “Excuse me there, young sir.”

It was Mr. Brown who had taken the Jet magazine from my hands. That was in late summer, just before I entered the sixth grade.

I wanted desperately to go to school. I’d lie on the rug in the living room, looking through the window at the great big blue that was the sky. The sky was not yellow then, at the time when I was waiting, day after day, for York to come home from that mysterious place. When the time came for kindergarten, I was ready. School was where big boys went.

I was five when I entered Sherman. The teacher was a matronly sort, younger than I am now, who raised her voice only at nap time. “I told you to close your eyes,” she’d say, and we'd do as we were told. How different was tiny Sister Ruth, my first-grade teacher at Our Lady of Angels. She was already an old woman, her face, wrinkled and not unkind, poking out of pie plate veiled with black material. I'd never seen anything like her. I stared at first in wonder and then, when I realized my mother had departed, leaving me in her care, dread. “I want my mother," I said, preparing to wail. Not much larger than a child herself. Sister Ruth acted quickly. Her hands, tucked into her voluminous sleeves, monk-fashion, appeared. Hands that arthritis had made into talons now gripped me at the shoulder. She did not hurt me; she simply let her body's presence be known. She was, her gesture said, the weight I must take account off. My mouth closed, I made not a peep.

A profound disorientation had begun earlier in the day. It was the distraction new clothes place on the body. I was like a puppy on a new leash. Dressed earlier that morning, for the first time in the school uniform of starched brown cotton short-sleeved shirt, wool sweater, and brown salt-and-pepper corduroy pants (the girls wore white blouses and navy-blue jumpers or skirts), I felt new and at the same time somehow very old, for the cords, especially, gave me an unfamiliar weightiness that bound me to the earth. Sufficiently grounded. Sister Ruth proved herself to offer simply more of the same stuff. When she felt me relax (or maybe simply give in), she pointed to an empty seat among rows of motionless, wide-eyed children sitting at attention, clearly already having undergone passage into her care. The good Sisters of Carondelet, the black-robed Augustinian priests of my high school, the host of teachers who would stand before me throughout my undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral career, each would find me tractable. With a gesture and an efficiency born from years of experience, tiny Sister Ruth had seen to that.

The bulky Goodyear blimp drumming low as it ploughs across the noon sky. The Blue Angels cutting an ear-splitting swatch overhead. My father's ship, a massive iron-grey wall of steel plating, the destroyer tender USS Prairie, docking in the harbor. Each of these I saw and each stretched my child's imagination. I did not see the dead man, even though he lay only a few feet from our back door.

More than once my father had said that if anyone ever died in his house, he’d move. Mr. Collins did not exactly die in our house. He died in the garage.

Mr. Collins was a big-bellied man with feet grown round and fat under the weight of him. He wheezed when he walked. He had dark pitted skin and peed in old milk bottles and cans rather than get up in the night to relieve himself. One morning my mother noticed that he had not appeared. By noon she was worried and knocked. There was no answer. Later that evening she got my father to use his key. “What’s wrong with Mister Collins?” we asked when he came back inside. He whispered something to my mother, went to the phone, and not king after, some men came to the door. “It was probably a heart attack,” the red-faced one said. “That's a pretty big guy there," said the other, in mild complaint. “Died in his sleep,” said the first. York's jaw, and mine, must have made a sound as they dropped. (Died! Dead!) My mother turned. “Go to bed," she said.

I can remember only one bad dream I had as a child. In my dream of sibling rivalry and wish fulfillment, I watched as Marcus, who was a baby in his crib, got trampled on by a robot. I did not dream about Mr. Collins. Maybe it was because I had not seen the body.

The next morning we were allowed to step inside what had been his home. There was his rumpled bed, his pillow greasily indented where his head had laid, his toothbrush in a Dixie cup, his shaving gear, his shoes cut on the sides because of bunions. There were newspapers heaped in stacks, magazines, jars with pee turned almost black, cans of tamales and sweet peas, a single plate and bowl, a plate and spoon and a can opener. In the closet were boxes of pressed and laundered shirts, suits and ties, shoes and underwear. The single room, cluttered and cramped, carried the intensely acrid odor of old pee.

As it happened, Mr. Collins died in the middle of Lent. Over the next weeks, I lugged all his laundered things to school and dropped them in the box we were using to collect clothes for the poor. (York, shy and self-conscious, wanted no part of the bounty.) Death was to prove for me an opportunity for gain. The sheer mass of goods I brought won me mention at Friday morning assembly. Public acknowledgement was the first highlight of my second grade. The second highlight was my First Holy Communion.

Father O'Connor placed the host on my tongue, and then, with head bowed, I returned to my seat. Getting the host down was not easy, for the white wafer was large and unbelievably dry, like cardboard. We were warned to swallow it whole, not to chew. (The impression Sister Saint Peter gave was that if we chewed the host, we’d be biting Baby Jesus.) After successfully gagging mine down, the rest of the morning was spent like a pregnant woman, walking carefully, so that I might not jostle this life within.

The third highlight of that year was my visit to the children’s section of the public library in Balboa Park. "You may find one or two books to take home with you," said the librarian (the first of that heroic, and mostly nameless, breed I have come to know all my life). I asked if I could keep them. "Oh no," she said, shaking her head. “You must return them so that others can read them too. But then you may check out some more."

The building was erected for the 1915 exposition at the corner of El Prado and Village Place, where the Casa del Prado now stands. It was an interim site, when the Carnegie Library was found no longer suitable and the new building downtown was not yet ready. As big as an airplane hangar and damp smelling, the ornately stuccoed building had the character of a church, except here there were books and books and books.

I searched one small comer of a shelf. With my mother’s help, I selected The Popover Family, the adventures of a family of clothespins. The California Tower carillon rang, its chimes bathing the moment in silvery notes. This was my first library book.

We jump to 1954. The main library has opened in its new quarters downtown, on E Street, across from the post office. Built with an eye to the International Style then popular, it is a boxy office-like affair, light and airy, and perhaps because of this ascription to clarity and light, to the secular, it lacks a quality of mystery that is essential to claim my deepest affection. Which is not to say that it will not play a crucial role in my development.

A notice announces a children's summer reading program. Any child reading ten books by August 15, 1954, and writing a seven-line summary of each book will receive a certificate of achievement. The librarian hands me an inked, mimeographed copy of the notice with the books I take out. I love the smell of the blue-inked mimeographed sheet. For each of my books that she stamps, she includes a half-page form onto which the required summary statements are to be written.

“You like to read, don’t you?" I nod in answer. “Well, go to it!"

And so I did. A teenager who outsmarts a gang of cattle thieves. A longhaired collie that saves a town. A good witch's potion that causes nightingales to sing. The awesome task was to reduce these absolutely perfect gems of narration to a seven-line summary statement with a word or two about what I liked best in each. In August, when I step forward to receive my certificate, 1 am giddy with my critical achievement. In memory, the moment I am handed the paper with my name inscribed comes attached with a slow-motion quality of inevitability, like magic. I am hooked, forever a bookworm.

Jimmy Campbell called me a nigger in the second grade. My next experience of racism was less direct and came not from a child. In the third grade I sliced my tongue open down the middle when I bit down on a root beer-flavored hard candy. Still, I loved those candies and asked Claudia for a nickel so I could buy another. She came across the yard to hand the coin to me. She and I would have been girlfriend and boyfriend if we had been older and had known the name of the propelling motive behind our silent gazes. As the coin passed between us. the nun working the lunch session swooped down. Claudia was snatched aside and scolded, made to cry, and as soon as school was over, sent home. I, however, had to wait until my mother came for me.

“He took money from another student," the nun announced, crossing her arms over her chest. My mother looked down at me. “She gave it to me," I said, offering half the truth.

“He asked for it!” The nun said, filling in the other half. She turned to take me in. There was a veiled quality to her eyes. “He must learn not to do such things," she said, nailing me to the floor with her gaze that at the same time hid her from me. It was unsettling to be looked at while at the same time spoken of as if I was not there. I began to cry. “You must make sure he does not do it again."

My mother promised to take care of it.

We crossed Market Street and made our way home. In her hurry to get to school, my mother had thrown a sweater over a yellow cotton housedress. I could not remember ever walking alone with her. Always there was another adult or one of my brothers in tow. How pretty she was as she began, with that walk, to take on an identity separate from that of my mother. (Later I would ask her age, and she would reply, "Almost 32.” It was an age utterly incomprehensible to me. For the next 15 years I held her there, unconsciously. Whenever I thought of my mother, I imagined her as being “almost 32.”) At the moment, however, my thoughts were for the most part confined to other more urgent matters. I said nothing and neither did she.

I always needed to go to the toilet when I was about to get a whipping. I had to go badly as we climbed the front steps of the house. My father whipped me three times in my life. My mother's number hovers somewhere around countless and includes the use of straps, ironing cords, and once, when she was pregnant with Andre, had Shawn not yet in the highchair, and three boys each utterly caught up in our loudly disordered affairs, she came at us with a broom, handle-point first. I have since seen how a single child can deliver a pair of doting adults over to flashes of criminal insanity. What was she doing, alone, with four children — 15,10,7,1, and, as I said, one on the way?

Though Benjamin Spock’s influential Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care was published in 1946, seven years earlier, his ideas in support of parental understanding and flexibility in child-rearing were thought ridiculous and absolutely wrong headed. “That’s what's wrong with the world today! Spoiled!" our mothers would say, shaking their heads while watching a child, usually white, throwing a tantrum, say, in the grocery store. “If they would give me him for a week,” my mother would say. There was not a child born, she believed, whose will she could not break. A child given too much attention, handling, or license was bound to end up a spoiled child; and by my mother’s reckoning, a spoiled child was close to an abomination before nature. The way she saw it, a parent didn't love the child who was given everything they wanted. “What are they going to do when their parents aren’t around? It isn't right not to prepare a child for living in the world.”

Inside, she told me to go to my room. She never whipped us when she was angry, she said, though this is not absolutely true. (Evidence, the broom incident.) “Change your clothes,” she said on the other side of the door. “And then you can go out and play.” How sweet those words sounded that at first I disbelieved my ears.

“I didn’t like her way with him,” I overheard her telling my father later. “And I don’t appreciate her telling me how to raise my child.”

Claudia and I weren't friends after that. I’d gotten her in trouble. As for that nun, later, when someone called me Sambo on the schoolyard, I ran to her to complain. “Don't be a tattletale." she snapped. “But he called me Sambo!" I said, angry at the injustice of it all. “And what's wrong with that?” she asked. I did not know what to say.

In a comer of the puzzle of my life there is stuck a pin that reads, “I Like Ike.” At election time, cars passed slowly through the streets with voices blaring through mobile public-address systems. If I have come to admire Adlai Stevenson much later, at the time “I Like Ike" had an immediate recognizability.

Permission to play in the street was received like the Emancipation Proclamation when it came. “Be careful of the cars," Murr warned. Cars were much fewer then. (We got our blue-and-yellow Buick Roadmaster in 1952.) In the streets we used the few parked cars as bases in our ball games, tag, and war. We rode our scooters and bikes and watched fully built houses carried past Pico’s Market. Bought from one lot and meant to grace another, a gingerbread Victorian, massive and ghostly, its windows boarded up to avoid breakage, passed on the flatbed of a truck like a schooner under sail. Once a team of handsome Clydesdales, their giant hooves resounding, drew a Budweiser wagon uptown.

York fixed up his Schwinn with handle grips, long fox tails, and mud flaps with inserts of ruby glass. With me riding in back, we'd deliver The Shopping News, and at the end of the month, after he made his collection, he’d give me $2. Our next job was working at the Navy commissary, where we’d wheel groceries out to cars and wait for a tip. I earned SI2, mostly in quarters, our first day. Later York got a job bagging groceries at M&S, downtown, and I took up delivering the morning Union. We joined Christmas clubs, saved our money, and watched with pleasure as our bank books were each week stamped and the rows of figures grew longer. (Work = SSS = Security.)

The teacher for my fourth and fifth grades looked like Deborah Kerr and Grace Kelly rolled into one. Thirty years later and in her 50s when she and I met and began a friendship as adults. Sister Josephine Martin (now called in these freer times Josie) wore sensible Birkenstocks, still had her girlish laugh, and in her beauty could not be compared to anyone else. She could still recall the names of my classmates (George Gowlovitch, Marilyn Alvarez, Joseph Pena, James Campbell, Charles Brown), children of immigrant East Europeans, resettled Midwesterners, blacks, and Mexicans whose parents were willing to pay $ 10 a month so their child might receive a parochial school education. Sister Josephine Martin had on file my family’s first telephone number (M-84238) and recalled memories of me that go further back than almost anyone else's.

In the fourth grade, I got that I was smart and put such knowledge to good advantage. I became a "teacher's pet," stole dimes from the Pagan Baby Fund, fell in love with Sister, and had my first terrifying existential moment when, sitting at my desk, I suddenly imagined that God was a huge yellow dog and we were fleas on God’s back. I wondered how much fleas mattered to a dog. Today the nearby freeway blunts its graceful dominance, but not then. The church and school stood together, serene. Late in August between my fourth and fifth grades, I walked onto the empty schoolyard. There were no kids screaming and racing about. No one was moving up to server in four-squares. The volleyball net was down, the basketball courts deserted. The slide was empty. The swings had been taken in. The water fountains had no lines of jostling kids. The year before, for the first time, I’d consciously looked upon my mother as separate from me. Since then I’d gone on to generalize, to see the world as distinct from myself. Looking at that empty schoolyard and seeing myself, alone, in it, I felt a pang of nameless grief.

Sister Josephine Martin appeared at the back door of the convent. She waved and then hurried across the yard, cutting a straight path through my sudden unhappiness. "You're just in time,” she said, breathless. She unlocked the doors and let me in the school. The others appeared. She gave us our tasks.

We erased pencil marks, glued and taped torn pages, covered the English and arithmetic books so that they would be fresh for the fifth graders. Rubbing the eraser over the pages, careful not to tear the paper, smelling the glue paste that lifted off the volumes, covering the texts — my earlier grief gone, I found myself besotted, completely lost in the work. That afternoon I fell madly and irrevocably in love with the printed page. Of course, it must happen some way, for me it was this love of things written that would lead to my childhood's end.

In the puzzle of my life, the events of that singular summer stand as central. Each piece of that time, when duly set, draws forth the figure from the ground. “That’s it!” I say when I get to this section. September I9SS. In the dog days of summer, heat sends gases rising in shimmering waves off the street, The rubber tires of my bike roll over the tarmac and give off a steady, faint sucking sound, like chewing gum. I walk my bike the last half a block and prop it against the building under the barber's pole, with its slow swirling band of red-and-white candy cane color.

I swam into the mixed odors of cigarettes and rose water. Vaseline, baby talc, witch hazel, and Konkalina, the hair straightener. The shop was cool and dark. A customer was in Grandpa’s chair. There were two barber's chairs, each of identical chrome and thick black horsehide leather that squeaked when you sat down. The chairs were built tall like thrones, with pedals and rests and a full rotation.

“Sit over there and stay out of the draft,” my grandfather said, pointing with his scissors and speaking over the hum of the rotating fan. Cooler than outside, it was still warm. It was after two, and Mr. Jackson, the other barber, was out to lunch.

Sunshine poured through the big picture window. Painted in black letters on the glass, the shop name, the Manhattan, was cast on the linoleum floor where it lay like a tattoo. Moving, I caught my reflection in the mirrors behind my grandfather. I took one of the hard-backed chairs against the wall. Next to me, on the table, was a stack of magazines. I was thirsty, but I’d have to wait for a drink of cold water.

Albert Sabin would, the next year, make public the oral vaccine that would halt the raging polio epidemic of the '50s. In the meantime adults worried, haunted by the images of their children suddenly collapsing, limbs useless, breath short. Look and Life magazines each ran picture stories of children on crutches and wearing braces or lying in machines called iron lungs that did their breathing. Kids were reported to get polio by overheating or cooling off too quickly, by standing in front of fans, going into air-conditioned rooms, or drinking ice-cold water. I’d have to wait for my drink.

"What you ridin' 'round in this heat for, young man? Don't you know not to exert in the middle of the day?" With age, the whites of Mr. Brown's eyes had gone yellow like his teeth. “You'll catch sunstroke," he said.

“I'm voting in the contest."

“And what kind of contest, you say?"

“Miss Rheingold," I answered. There was a stack of magazines on the table next to me. I picked one up, studying the cover.

“Professor, you hear what your grandson is sayin’ over there?" sang out Mr. Cartwell, his Jamaican accent pitching his laugh higher than the others.

The Rheingold beer company was running a contest to select a Miss Rheingold. Each of the four finalists was pictured in the display at Bruno's, the grocery owned by a Portuguese at the comer of Imperial and 30th Street. York and his friends had already stuffed the ballot box with their choice of a blond with a dimpled smile. My Miss Rheingold had dark hair.

My grandfather usually gave me a dime to buy a soda at Bruno’s. I planned to ask when he was finished with the man in the chair. He was using the scissors to touch up behind the ears, so I knew it wouldn't be long. I put down the first magazine and picked up another. It was let, a weekly news magazine written for blacks. I began leafing through it.

They say that critical moments, like an instant before a head-on collision, send our entire lives flowing before our eyes. At other times the obverse occurs, when events are recalled in a series of minutely defined details.

I turned a page.

I can remember the high drone of a fly at the window, the humming fan. and the drafts of circulating air. Mr. Brown at the water cooler takes a paper cup that makes a soft pop! as it is pulled away from the cup dispenser. He presses the button that releases the water. The spigot opens and water in the five-gallon glass container gurgles. I remember each sound as I recall how I turned a page and saw the photograph. The image lies dead center in the puzzle of my life. It looked like a catfish. There was mud, eyes bloated shut, and pulpy lips. It took me a moment to recognize this as a human head.

Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy, had been visiting family in Mississippi when he was abducted, tortured, then shot, and his body dumped in the Tallahassee River. I turned the page. At 11, all adults looked more or less the same to me. In short-sleeve shirts, the two men stared defiantly at the camera. Till had whistled at the wife of one of those men. The dark-haired one was heavy, the other younger and fair. Gazing at their images, a shiver of feeling — a kind of a dread — passed over my body. There was a searing pain in my lap. My erection was tearing at my body.

I turned the page back and stared at the bloated face of the boy. I cannot say how long I looked or knew that around that moment, a wary silence had flowered.

“What’s that you’re reading?”

I heard my grandfather, but I could not lift my eyes from the page. Feeling somehow guilty, as if caught red-handed, I could not move and I could not speak.

“Son, you hear the professor talking to you?”

“See what it is the boy’s got there,” said my grandfather.

There was something inevitable about it all. like a car crash. As it was happening there was a slow - motion sense that this is what it is, that this is the way it’s always been meant to be. Mr. Brown drew close and looked over my shoulder.

“It’s about that Till boy,” he told the others, speaking low.

“Give it to me, son." He took the magazine from my hands.

I remember he held in his other hand his crushed drinking cup.

Maybe it sounds strange, but it was not the image of the dead boy nor his killers that took my childhood away. Nor was it the complicated experience of terror that gave me my erection. What took from me what some would call my innocence was the look of those old men.

In that long-endured pause (which could have been no more than a few seconds), we studied one another. Even the man enthroned in the barber's chair sat up and let our eyes meet, latter, against unassailable proof, the jury of all white men would acquit the pair and help to form the consciousness of my generation. But in the meantime, I could not understand. I am sure that is what my look said.

No one spoke. I wanted to know why a boy had been killed. They held steadfast and met my gaze and in this way answered that they could no more protect me from that boy's killers than was Emmett Till's uncle able to protect him. Old men ashamed of their impotency, they were willing to stand exposed before me because this, at least, they could offer. I was too young to understand it all. I lost my secret erection. All feeling was gone.

“I’m thirsty," I said, breaking the spell.

“Go and get yourself a soda pop." My grandfather turned to his change drawer. “Here, let me," said Mr. Cartwell, going for his wallet. The others were already digging inside their pockets.

I never voted for Miss Rheingold. At Bruno’s, I averted my eyes from the beer cooler where the display was set. I spent all the money, then went outside and sat on the curb, where I gulped down the Nehi orange and ate the frozen chocolate banana. I went slower on the root beer. Cars passed down Imperial Avenue, sunlight gleaming off their hoods. I ale one Hostess cupcake and crumbled the other for the birds, but no birds came. By my second Twinkie, I was feeling sick. A shadow fell at my feet. In late summer, when it’s hottest, the San Diego sky bleaches yellowish, a dog’s-eye color. Mr. Jackson, the other barber, stood over me, a black silhouette outlined against that ocher smear. He had a toothpick between his teeth.

“What you out in this heat for?" he asked.

I shrugged.

“Come on, let’s get you out of the heat."

I did not move.

“What are you crying for?"

I looked down.

“Does your grandpa know you’re out here?”

I said nothing.

Then Mr. Jackson was gone. I still had some root beer, a Baby Ruth, and half a Twinkie left. But I couldn't eat any more. I went to stand, but things went haywire, and I ended on my knees throwing up. Out of the comer of my eye I could see them coming for me, and still I threw up. My soul, I expect, came up with the dry heaves.

I went on being sick and was that way for a long time. As far as I know, for the next 40 years the sky over San Diego remained a bleached yellow color of a dog’s eye.