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Chapter 1

Watching the Shimmer from the Shore

In Michigan, it is impossible to be far from a body of water. That pretty much explains Lakeside Homes, the public housing project where I spent the first fifteen years of my life. Lakeside was built on the shores of Pontiac’s Crystal Lake and designed to shelter the great influx of workers who flocked to the auto manufacturing jobs in the Detroit exurb of Pontiac. This public housing project was not the urban nightmare that springs to mind when the term “projects” is used. Instead of the fatherless welfare-dependent families stereotypically associated with public housing, Lakeside was home to many young nuclear families with working fathers and even stay-at-home mothers. Most of these families comprised recently migrated black Southerners, with a smattering of Mexicans and even the odd white family. The renderings in the project offices depicted a cheery tree-filled community of garden apartments with landscaped public lawns, playgrounds, and private, fenced, and gated backyards, all set on a sparkling body of water. It should have been idyllic.

In reality, the lake was polluted, the constant wear and tear of hundreds of young children soon turned the common lawns into patchy, dandelion-dotted turf, and the sapling trees struggled to survive the kids’ constant assaults. The playgrounds were the site of much fighting and bullying, and the small lake, though pretty on sunny days, was surrounded by tall reeds and was rumored to be habited by a green man who would carry off any child foolish enough to wander into the weeds. Occasionally, bigger boys and men would venture onto the lake in small boats and catch huge, inedible, scary carp with scales as big as a man’s fingernails. The housing commission did its best, routinely maintaining and improving the brightly trimmed housing units and protecting the young trees by coating them with thick, tarry goo. Some of the families maintained neat yards, even planting flower beds and growing morning glories in the chain-link fences. Others had to receive threatening notices from the project office before they would mow their ankle-high growth. The sprightly yellow tulips my mother planted on the sides of our front door quickly had their heads snapped off, presumably by the “bad” kids who roamed the projects casually vandalizing whatever struck their fancy.

Our neighbors included the Reverend Morris, his kind, pretty wife Miss Bertha, their tall son Leo, and the good-looking Pryor family at the end of our row, with names like Kirjathous, Kirlather, Mentre Jean, Lady Mae, and Lorisul. In the row behind us was a family of misbehaving kids who I’m pretty sure stole our clothes off the backyard clotheslines after dark. Two doors away was the Gonzalez family, whose parents seemed to speak no English, but whose numerous children quickly picked up black English and became honorary Negroes. In those early days, there was a white family next door to us. I forget their last name, but their pudgy kids Tony and Mary used to talk to my brother and me over the backyard fence. Some of the families belonged to our church, Trinity Baptist, and socialized with us at the occasional potluck dinner. There was always someone to play with, and most days no one tried to beat me up. Until I was old enough to know what I was missing, I was pretty happy.

For my mother, a pretty young divorcée raising two of her three small children alone, the project apartments were a dream come true. When she married my father, she had left her firstborn, my brother Gary, in the care of our great-grandparents. They doted on Gary and were appalled at the notion of his being subject to the will of a stepfather they did not care for. Their fears might have been unfounded, but their low expectations for the marriage were not. Within three years, my mother had filed for divorce. Her ex-husband, my father, was a known figure in town. We certainly knew ourselves to be his children; my brother even carried what I felt to be the burden of his unusual first name, Spurgeon, but our father provided only the minimal financial support the court required him to pay, and gave us nothing emotionally. He was a union steward, a self-made man, and a bit of a blowhard who wielded a small amount of power with a great deal of brio. I remember telling my fellow neighborhood preschoolers that my father was “the president of the world” and not being challenged. He was the kind of man who would drive by in his latest shiny new car, toot the horn, and wave without stopping to say hello or offer us a ride. When we asked our mother why they had gotten divorced, she gave us one unchanging answer: “Because we couldn’t get along.”

Our father quickly remarried, to a Southern homemaker who was almost the opposite of our stylish, striving mother. They lived in a small single-family home not far away on the South Side, with a young brood of two girls and two boys who we occasionally saw at my father’s sister’s house. Having had the audacity to leave him, my mother was pretty much on her own. Finding a nice new apartment with a fenced-in backyard was quite a coup. With the help of her family, Mama completely furnished our small two-bedroom apartment in 1950s décor. In the living room, there was an overstuffed, navy chenille-upholstered sofa and a matching chair, blond end tables with tall geisha-girl figurine lamps, colorful framed prints of birds on the walls, pull-down shades, and snowy sheer curtains at the windows. There was a sunny yellow faux-leather-and-metal dinette set in the kitchen, twin beds and matching dresser for the kids’ room, and a handsome double bed and dresser for her masterless master bedroom. When I recall the first home I knew, I see evidence of the mother who raised me everywhere. Always accentuating the best of her life, she outfitted the place to please herself, not to impress others, and the result was a compilation of items that reflected her idea of what was pretty and her pleasant, unpretentious view of the world.

We weren’t the Cleavers—except for his annual half-hour Christmas visit, my father was little more than a name on checks that arrived from the Oakland County Friend of the Court—but we were a family. I idolized my attractive, smart mother, and it was awhile before I realized that our circumstances were less than ideal. Mama lavished affection on us kids; when I was old enough to visit my neighborhood friends, it slowly dawned on me that not everyone was hugged and kissed daily as we were. Their parents might have been too stressed out to indulge them in the little ways our mother did with us. If I bumped my knee on the couch and cried, my mother was likely to give the couch a whack and a stern, “Don’t you ever hit my baby like that again!” Even as a small child, I knew this was silly, but I loved it that my mother cared enough to attack inanimate objects on my behalf. We had nice clothes, new shoes, and enough toys and books to junk up the apartment that my mother straightened up after we finally went to bed. Having never lived with my father, I was oblivious to his absence. With the casual acceptance that children enjoy, I assumed a father was optional. In those early days, the charming camouflage of new furniture, a clean house, reliable meals, and a peaceful environment shielded me from a harsher reality. Over time, the realization seeped out of the TV that our family and our neighborhood were somehow lacking, and I began to feel deprived, a sensation that would be with me for many years and later be given names like “underprivileged” and “disadvantaged.” When I learned that our side of the lake was called Mud Lake, I felt ashamed and wondered why God hadn’t put us on the Crystal Lake side. When I noticed that the people on that side of the lake were white, I wondered why God liked them better than us. I don’t remember blaming white people for anything; since they seemed to have so much, I wanted to be like them.

* * *

“I never cut class. I loved getting A’s, I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world.” —Michelle Obama

The first thing I remember knowing about myself is that I was smart. I got a lot of attention for being articulate and curious. The more grown-ups told me that I was smart, the smarter I wanted to be. One thing I quickly noticed was that being smart was associated with “going places” and “getting somewhere in life.” I took these phrases literally and quickly came to the conclusion that everyone knew leaving Mud Lake was a smart thing to do. I felt that desire increasingly validated within me. Where did I think I would go? At age four or five, I was thinking that wherever Wally and Beaver lived, with the neat lawns and cute houses, would be nice, and that Ricky and Lucy Ricardo seemed to have it pretty good in a place called New York. I was also drawn to wherever John Forsythe was living (Malibu?) in his TV series Bachelor Father, but at that age, “ocean” was only a word, and for all I knew, the sandy dunes of that show might only exist within the brown box of our tabletop TV. My impressions of “somewhere” and “places” came almost entirely from television and glimpses of the impressive homes of Bloomfield Hills, an affluent neighboring community. When I think of some of the places I have been—the White House, Beverly Hills, the Waldorf Astoria, the Plaza Hotel, the Eiffel Tower, the Apollo Theater, the Amazon rainforest, and too many mansions to count—I realize my quest to get “somewhere” and go “places” had very little to do with tangible physical destinations. It was much more about not staying on the scruffy shore of Mud Lake, a place that was all too real.

One very early experience of “going places” was the monthly family trip to Jackson, Michigan. In those pre-expressway days, the journey to Jackson was a long, drowsy-making excursion through foreign farm country: green, open meadows where languid cows and grazing horses lifted their heads to glance at my great-grandfather’s slope-roofed, aging Pontiac, and where weathered roadside Burma-Shave signs seemed to outnumber human beings. When I could manage to capture a window seat, I stared out at the foreign territory that is rural Michigan, feeling disconnected from this world without the cracked pavement, chain-link fencing, and cacophony of voices of my everyday surroundings. I remember a slight fear that we might somehow be stranded in these hamazulas of the Lower Peninsula, and I was anxious that we keep moving toward civilization as I knew it. My future as a city-dweller was probably foreshadowed by my unease with the lonely distances between farmhouses and my relief when the buildings of the University of Michigan and the city of Ann Arbor appeared on the horizon. After we passed these, I knew we were not far from our destination: the long, flat-roofed edifice of the Southern Michigan Correctional Facility, known to us as Jackson Prison.

There, my grandfather, a small, gentle man who held me tightly and kissed my face lovingly when families were allowed to embrace at the beginning of a visit, was imprisoned for all of my childhood, having been sentenced to natural life for the crime of murder.

Until the day I worked up the courage to ask my mother what her father Walter had done, no one in the family ever discussed the crime or his conviction, and as a small child I simply accepted those trips as a normal part of life. There was invariably a wait after we arrived at the prison. Later, I found out that my grandfather always took the time to shower, shave, and change clothes before greeting his family. Before the visitors’ grille was replaced by a microwave oven and automated food vending machines, we used to lunch on delicious, greasy hamburgers that were prepared by trustee prisoners in white clothing, aprons, and hairnets.

Eventually, a uniformed officer would call out my grandfather’s last name, and our family would proceed through a series of locked gates, with the adult males being patted down by prison personnel. (The ladies’ purses had been checked in at the front desk.) Before I was old enough to understand its terrible significance, I loved the sound the barred metal doors made as they clanged shut behind us. We kids were sometimes allowed to play with the numbered metal disk that served as a receipt while the adults conversed in quiet tones, sitting opposite my grandfather with a wooden half-wall between them. Over the years, the visiting room became less restrictive and our family was allowed to sit in a small cluster without barriers, but my childhood memories were of watching my grandfather’s face behind a wire mesh screen, with the whole room being surveyed by an armed guard seated on a platform. Even when the procedures were at their most restrictive, they never stopped my great-grandmother from passing the tiny, folded hundred-dollar bill under her tongue to her beloved son, whom she was allowed to kiss on the mouth at the beginning of the visit. My grandfather had nicknames for everyone; I later learned that this was to keep our names from being known by other inmates or by the prison officials whom he assumed read every one of the letters that regularly arrived at our homes. They were written in his ornate cursive, with salutations like Dearest, Most beautiful, Most loving, Most wonderful, Most devoted, Most intelligent, Most caring, etc. I was told that these long greetings were meant to frustrate the prison “screws” who had the right to invade his privacy and try to fathom the meaning of his references to Big Shot (his sister Dean), Boss Man (my infant son), and many others who were never referred to by their given names.

Occasionally, our long ride to Jackson would turn out to be in vain. My grandfather was sometimes in “the hole,” usually for fighting. These infractions were sometimes the result of fending off attempted sexual assault. As I grew older, I learned that despite his diminutive size and soft-spoken manner, my grandfather was a “tough guy.” Men who knew him spoke of a fearlessness that no one could explain. “He just ain’t scared of nobody,” my cousin Henry said, with a look that contained both admiration and the knowledge that fearlessness can be a dangerous quality for a black man to possess. My grandfather’s reputation—built on incidents like the time, feeling he had been cheated, that he reclaimed his losses from a local gambling joint at gunpoint—probably contributed to his being convicted twice of a robbery/murder committed at a local pool hall. Those verdicts, based on circumstantial evidence, robbed him of twenty-one years, seven months, and seven days of his life; convictions that were overturned and called “a travesty of justice” when I was a young adult.

On the day he was freed, as we walked away from the Oakland County Jail, we heard a voice yell out, “Mr. Banks! Mr. Banks!” When my granddad turned around, a huge racket of whistles, clapping, and banging of anything that would produce a sound broke out. Exclamations like “God bless you!” and “Good luck!” rained down from the black prisoners he had left in the grip of the penal system. For these men, most of them at the beginning of the journey that had finally ended for Walter, to see him walking free must have buttressed their hopes of returning to life on the outside one day. Strangely, though as a young adult I was overjoyed to see him free, my own childhood fantasies of escape from Mud Lake had never extended to my grandfather being released from prison. Perhaps because he had always been there, Jackson was simply where he lived. Unlike today’s reality, where so many black men are incarcerated that a child could hardly be blamed for seeing prison as a fact of African American life, I can’t remember knowing anyone else who had an incarcerated relative during my early years.

I don’t remember much discussion of my granddad’s guilt or innocence among family members; our loyalty and unconditional love were an immutable fact of life. As is the case with so many jailed black men, he was neither as guilty as society found him nor as innocent as his loved ones might have wished. When he was released, my grandfather seamlessly rejoined what remained of the family he left and took up his life without much talk of the time he had lost. Walter’s homecoming was not entirely without dramatic undertones, though. Without a word to the family, a day or so after his release, he visited his ex-wife—the only grandmother I ever knew—to come to terms regarding the house he had built and which she now shared with her current husband. This negotiation carried the potential to be a whole lot less civilized than the peaceful resolution that actually went down. Elders in the family told me that as a younger man, Walter might have approached this kind of discussion accompanied by a pistol. They breathed a collective sigh when the parties came to a quick and amicable settlement; my grandfather was not known for his patience. With the money he had, he quickly bought a car and a small house in Pontiac’s East Side, planted a garden, and reignited his relationship with a lady named Willie, a former paramour whom he fondly referred to as “Bill.” The East Side house was rumored to be a near-gift from a hustler named Roy, a hometown brother whom Walter had taken under his protection in prison. The one comment I ever heard my grandfather make on the subject of incarceration was, “They got enough of my life. I made up my mind they wouldn’t get any more of it by my thinking about the joint or talking about it. I never opened my eyes one day thinking I was still inside. The first morning I was out, I woke up knowing I was free.”

What seemed like aeons later, from my thirty-eighth-floor office at UniWorld, I would watch families from a Herald Square welfare hotel as they boarded an ironic yellow school bus to visit the missing men of their families on Rikers Island.

It was awhile before I shared the story of my grandfather and my childhood trips to prison with any of my New York friends. Although I knew it must, I felt as if my experience had almost nothing in common with the children leaving those hellish hotels and getting on those ignominious buses. I thought of my granddad not as a common criminal, but as a hothead who had been falsely imprisoned for a horrible offense he did not commit. Perhaps, like my grandfather, I felt that prison had taken enough of my life. The shameful reality of criminal life just didn’t square up with my freed grandfather, my image of myself, or the kind of child I had been when I made those long-ago family visitations.

When I was that child, I couldn’t wait for school to teach me how to read. I felt frustrated that there was a code all around me that I couldn’t crack. One day, riding down a rural highway in a car, I saw a roadside billboard with a big black panther on it. My inability to read the words on it made me so frustrated I cried. When my mother read books to me, I longed for the words to be as understandable as the pictures. I stared at the pages, willing the words to become comprehensible. Our babysitter’s grown son, a lean, ramrod-straight soldier whom we called Uncle, was a smart guy who loved to test our young brains. He was always posing riddles and showing us cool stuff—like how magnets would stick to metal but repel each other. One day, he challenged my brother and me—the first one to tell him the word affixed to the corner of the window fan would get a nickel. My brother Spurgeon, who in my five-year-old eyes knew everything, may have been distracted by thoughts of the ice cream he would buy with his nickel. I, on the other hand, slid right back into my usual focus: trying to make sense of this arrangement of the ABCs I had known forever. This time, inexplicably, something clicked.

“Is it Country Aire?” I asked.

Our uncle, astonished, replied that it was. “Did somebody already tell you that?” he asked.

“No, I just know it.”

I was just as surprised as he. It was an incredible experience. I had willed myself to comprehend something. I had taught myself to read. I don’t remember reading anything else until I went to school, but the feeling that I could, through sheer will, break through a barrier and get into a world I had been locked out of was born that day.

* * *

While my mother worked, we were left with Elsie Cooper, a stout, Arkansas-born matron whom we called Mama Cooper, and who was more like a grandmother than a paid caretaker. When my mother dropped us off at her house early on cold winter mornings, she let us go back to sleep snuggled next to her in bed, only to wake up to the aroma of thick slab bacon frying in the kitchen. She would serve it up with scrambled eggs and biscuits dripping with butter. After breakfast, I would sit between her knees as she combed and braided my unruly hair and chatted with her friends about the latest diet, deaths in the community, and the disaster of someone having missed the daily numbers jackpot by one digit, or having had all the digits but failed to “box” them and ensure a win. As she prepared dinners of fresh vegetables from her garden, fried chicken, or pork chops, and beat bowls of cornbread batter, we watched her favorite soap operas, The Guiding Light and Search for Tomorrow. Occasionally, she would call one of her friends and exclaim, “Did you see what that low-down woman just did?” Or, “That dirty dog! God’s gonna get him for that!”

In the early afternoon Spurgeon would come in from school with his usual treasure trove of knowledge garnered in first grade. Mama Cooper, though barely educated herself, believed in learning and loved smart children. She would talk with Spurgeon and me about whatever he had learned that day.

Later in the afternoon, her husband, Mr. Henry, her younger son Arthur, and her pretty green-eyed daughter Alla Mary would come in from their jobs at the Pontiac Motors plant. After they dropped their lunch boxes in the kitchen, they sat around the dining table waiting for dinner to be ready and reading the Pontiac Press that they had divided among themselves. All three would bring up items in the paper, and we were always included in the discussion.

“Whatcha think about them Russians and that Sputnik satellite, junior? You gonna go to outer space when you grow up?”

“Val, the Queen of England is coming to the United States. You reckon she’s gonna make it all the way to Pontiac?”

I doubt that any kid in today’s formal preschool gets more individual attention. The Coopers instilled in us a respect for learning and knowledge that neither of us has ever lost. Their questions, devoid of obstacles and limits, also made me an incorrigible dreamer who could easily imagine myself meeting the Queen of England, perhaps with my brother the astronaut by my side.

One of my creative heroes, Gordon Parks, had a theory that he didn’t tend to see barriers because in his childhood on the Great Plains, the vista was clear to the horizon. The Coopers exuded an unspoken optimism about the future because life had delivered them from the cotton fields of Arkansas to the promised land of the factory job, homeownership, and a new car in the driveway. After dinner, bellies full, my brother and I would watch TV until my mother picked us up. I favored Pinky Lee, a Pee Wee Herman–type comedian, but Mama Cooper usually insisted we watch The Auntie Dee Show because every once in a while we would see a “colored” faced like our own. I loved being with the Coopers and remain close to the family to this day. Still, partly because of their encouragement to envision myself as part of a world I could sense but not yet see, I longed to explore what lay beyond the comforting bosom of Mama Cooper’s care. I couldn’t wait to go to school.

Some children cling to their parents and feel abandoned when they are left in a strange place called school. I barely remember my mother being around on the day I arrived, raring to go, at the entrance to the kindergarten of Bethune Elementary School. Bethune was a midcentury-modern building our booming city had just erected, presumably to handle the influx of black baby boomers from Lakeside Homes. I remember learning how to sit still for story time, how to play rhythm instruments like tambourine and woodblock. We walked, marched, and ran around the classroom to music. To this day, I can hum the tune from the skipping portion of that exercise. I remember that we were shown a movie called A Desk for Billie, about a little girl who moved around a lot (with her family of migrant workers?). That was the first time I realized that white people could also have money problems and live in less-than-desirable neighborhoods. I loved school, with the exception of recess, which was a waste of time and a boon to classroom bullies. My first-grade teacher was a lovely black lady whom I knew from Sunday school and church. I’m not sure whether she had already noticed me from my brief performances on Easter Sunday, when we children recited short poems about Jesus and the Resurrection, but she immediately paid attention to me as a student and was the first of many teachers to nurture my academic progress. At Christmastime, I was stunned and pleased to receive a subscription to Children’s Digest as a gift from her. I read every issue cover to cover, partly because those magazines were a reminder that my reading ability made me special to someone important.

The following school year, the same teacher was instrumental in having me skip second grade. I had no idea why I was being taken to the principal’s office, but when asked to read for her, I was only too happy to show off in front of adults. My new third-grade teacher was an elegant, artsy woman who read us the poverty-to-glory saga of our school’s namesake and opened our minds to the possibility of Negro greatness. Mary McLeod Bethune, daughter of freed slaves, founded Bethune-Cookman College by selling sweet potato pies—a fact I later used in an ad about black colleges—and became an advisor to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

My teacher was a tall, unconventional beauty. She wore stacks of bangle bracelets on her long arms; her thin waist was often cinched with a wide leather belt that divided the swirling fullness of her skirts from the form-fitting turtleneck sweaters and simple shirts she favored. A mass of loose curls—what we called “good hair”—framed her bronze face with its sharp, birdlike features. She was the first sophisticated woman I knew, and her class was my introduction to culture. She taught us a few French phrases and ignited a lifelong love of that language in me. After school, she taught the basics of ballet to those of us who were willing to stay, which led to years of dancing lessons that my mother somehow managed to pay for. Our teacher spoke of her daughters, Piper and Kyle, and their unusual names were a beacon to an exotic world I wanted to enter. When our school performed an abbreviated version of The Nutcracker Suite at Christmas, the teacher provided the costume for my dance as a Chinese doll: a pair of pajamas with black pants and a pink top with black frog closures and a cheongsam-style neck. She gave them to me as a Christmas gift and they became a prized possession.

My mother was an involved parent; our teachers were invited to our home. Lunching on the tuna salad sandwiches and Campbell’s French onion soup my mother set out on our cloth-covered kitchen table, the teachers who came to the projects seemed at ease in their surroundings. They also seemed to appreciate my mother’s efforts to provide my brother and me with some semblance of the idealized life we were bombarded with by Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized our teachers might have come from similar situations themselves, raised by striving parents to lift themselves out of poverty via the well-trod route of higher education. I was proud that my mother was not intimidated by my teachers and conversed with them easily using the Standard English that to my young ear sounded so much more refined than the black Southern dialect that wafted on the air in our neighborhood. When my mother made an appearance at the school, I was always bursting with pride at her neat, well-groomed, and undeniably attractive appearance. Her hair was always pressed and curled, not nappy even at the “kitchen” near the nape of the neck that often announced the need for a visit to the hairdresser in those days. Her stockings were absent of runs; her shoes were polished and not worn out at the heels like those of some of my classmates’ mothers. Chatting with the teachers, she looked like one of them.

In fourth grade, there was stern and wonderful Mildred Garling, also a member of our church. Mrs. Garling was a teacher who appreciated my abilities but gave me less special treatment than I had received in first and third grades. When I finished my class work early, rather than let me help out in the school office, collect weekly milk money, or grade other students’ spelling tests, Mrs. Garling gave me more work to do. When she noticed that I was not as proficient in math as in language arts, she requested that my mother drill me with flash cards at home. The gifts she gave me, while less enjoyable than a magazine subscription or pretty Chinese pajamas, were more valuable. From Mrs. Garling, I learned discipline and not to expect that the world would let me rest on my laurels.

Elementary school was filled with memorable characters and experiences. My fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Hull, an Ichabod Crane–like Appalachian white man, cautioned us against underestimating hillbillies. His admonition completely baffled us. Before television’s The Beverly Hillbillies, most children of my Negro community saw no distinction between groups of white people. My personal assumption was that all of them were from Leave It to Beaver land, and went home at night to manicured lawns and neat houses where they ate steak and creamed peas for dinner. I would eventually find out how deeply our teacher was affected by the sense that other teachers saw him as being from the Mud Lake side of white America. Red-faced and nearly apoplectic, he sent me to the principal’s office after my friend Delores and I circulated a petition protesting his decision to appoint our student council representatives—choosing two bright but shy students—rather than allowing us to elect them. The fact that his fellow teachers agreed with my position greatly exacerbated my crime. I was sent home until my mother could come to the principal’s office with me. As far as I was concerned, my petition was democracy in action, a peaceful protest against a dictator. Mr. Hull was violating our student rights to hold an election that, incidentally, I had lobbied all summer to win. My mother supported my actions in principle, but was furious with me for causing her to miss half a day of work. “Why can’t you just go to school and act like other kids?”

In time, she came to accept that being “like other kids” was something I would never quite get the hang of. In the end, after hearing my impassioned plea for justice, the principal convicted me on a technicality: I had circulated a document throughout the school that had not been cleared through her office. The previous afternoon of suspension constituted my punishment. This was my first inkling that the system might be rigged against me. I was a little upset with Mama for not being angrier with Mr. Hull. He later felt her wrath, though—not for this, but for referring to a dark-skinned, chubby classmate of mine as Aunt Jemima. I was proud that my mother stood up for her and demanded an apology from Mr. Hull. Justice delayed felt better than no justice at all.

My sixth-grade teacher, a very proper lady, gave our class a memorable lecture on avoiding “niggerisms”—i.e., loud and unruly behavior and bad table manners—before a field trip to the Detroit Institute of Arts. This clearly did not have the desired effect. A couple of us watched, mortified, as several students decimated the ketchup, relish, and mustard packets offered at the end of the cafeteria line. Today, I realize they might have been hoarding food so they wouldn’t go hungry later.

Among my small but cherished memories of elementary school: my pride the day my Aunt Dean’s husband chauffeured a carload of us in their turquoise Cadillac on a class trip to the zoo; and the time my dance performance as Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was written about in the Pontiac Press, though I’m still not sure why.

When I was in fifth grade, my brother Spurgeon and I took part in a school-wide speech contest on the subject “What Good Sportsmanship Means to Me.” I relished the opportunity to show off my ease with public speaking, a blessing that had been nurtured by Easter Sunday pieces and other church programs. Though the specifics of my talk are long forgotten, I know that like so many things in my life, much of the content was gleaned from the lessons of Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and other sources from the TV world, where cheaters never won and kids settled their disputes without the physical throw-downs that happened every day in the projects. I transcribed my carefully wrought words onto the index cards we were encouraged to use onstage and practiced my delivery in front of Mama’s vanity mirror. Never one to suffer from stage fright, I made it through the preliminary round of the competition, as did my brother and several other of the more attentive students.

On the night of the finals, after all the contestants had spoken, the judges’ deliberations dragged on and on. The contest audience grew restless, and our elementary school band was asked to entertain them with an unrehearsed number. Our band teacher, eyes cast heavenward, prefaced our off-key, squeak-laden rendition of “Clare de Lune” with these words to the audience: “You know not what you ask.”

When the judges finally emerged, the decision was first place for my brother, second for me. Although I felt my speech had been the best, in those prefeminist days, losing to my older brother was an acceptable outcome. The judges’ decision later led to some very unsportsmanlike reactions from other parents, and culminated in one contestant delivering his speech months later at sixth-grade graduation, a head-scratching non sequitur as far as the audience was concerned. Just a couple of years ago, my mother disclosed that on her next visit to the beauty shop after the contest, our hairdresser remarked, “You must be very proud of your children taking first and second like that. Your son didn’t win, though. Your daughter did.” Even now, it makes me smile to know that at least one adult shared my opinion of that performance.

At Bethune, I also unofficially began my advertising career by creating the slogan for my brother Gary’s winning campaign for student council president: You’ll Rise to the Highest Ranks If You Vote for Gary Banks! At the time, a decade before innovators like Bill Bernbach ushered in advertising’s creative revolution, I’m sure I was influenced by ad slogans from my early childhood, like, You’ll Wonder Where the Yellow Went, When You Brush Your Teeth with Pepsodent. I was also secretly gratified to have been part of vanquishing Gary’s opponent, the undisputed light-skinned diva of Bethune elementary, who, as I prepared for my role as Rudolph in the school Christmas play, had advised me, “Just go outside in the cold until your nose turns red.” She said this knowing that my chocolate-brown nose would probably turn blue before it reddened like hers. Her “advice” was a stinging, deliberate reminder of the advantages that her complexion bestowed. My brother’s student council victory was my very satisfying rejoinder.

All in all, Bethune Elementary was a positive experience. The school cemented my early identity as a noticeably smart kid, which was more than fine with me. Having not been blessed with the light skin, long hair, or professional parents that conferred status in those days, I was happy to flaunt an attribute that could make me stand out. I loved basking in the spotlight, and cultivated a community of people who expected great things from me. Adults, unlike kids, placed high value on doing well in school, as if they knew we good students would pay the price among our peers for our straight As, and they cheered our accomplishments in the neighborhood’s churches, beauty parlors, and barbershops. Being one of those kids was worth the price of being far from the most popular kid on the playground.

Soon, it was time to move onward to Jefferson Junior High. As usual, I was chomping at the bit.

* * *

They were calling all the smart kids first. One by one, homeroom 202 of Jefferson Junior High’s class of 1964 was assembled at the front of the gymnasium on the first day of school. Many of us had heard of each other, though we came from four different elementary schools. In Pontiac, if you were a brainy Negro child, word got around. Bespectacled Veta Smith came from Bagley School, but lived on the other side of the projects. Alvin Bessent’s parents were friends of my step-grandmother. His name had stood out when she mentioned him as someone who might be even smarter than me, a speculation I highly doubted. We were gathered into a group of about twenty and ushered to homeroom 202 as other kids in the gym murmured their awareness of who we were—“That’s the smart room.” They said this without a great deal of envy; other kids had their own, more admired claims to fame. Athletes, cool kids, great dancers, and girls with precociously developed bodies were quite secure in their identities. Being smart was okay, but it had limited appeal. Kids could aspire to become better football and basketball players. They could find ways to become more popular. God willing, they might develop the breasts and booties of the precociously hot girls. But smarts were considered a gift that you either had or you didn’t. Whether this was right or wrong, the school seemed to embrace the concept. Once our collection of future lawyers, dentists, journalists, doctors of philosophy and medicine, advertising executives, nurses, and engineers was assembled, we were never separated during the three years of junior high school. Of the group we left in the gym, only one student was ever added to our homeroom.

The kids of homeroom 202 were young, gifted, and black, although in those days we would have called ourselves Negroes. Thanks to the magic of academic tracking, we no longer ran the risk of catching an after-school beatdown for being a teacher’s pet. All of homeroom 202 was the teacher’s pet, and the beauty of it was, no one else was around to see it.

We became leaders of Jefferson Junior High. Whereas in the past, we might have felt competitive with other bright kids, as a group we took on an expanded identity. For the first time in our school careers, we were not oddities to be put on display like trick ponies: Watch this, everybody! Valerie, spell antidisestablishmentarianism! We were part of a group. In the confines of the classes we shared, we were free to fully express our potential, to speak Standard English, voice our unrealistic aspirations, even ask our dorky questions—Where does the wind come from? Who writes the dictionary?—without fear of being mocked.

For me, the three years of junior high school were a time full of creativity. A poem I wrote, “Mountains,” was even published in a national anthology, Songs of Youth.

One night, as I lay on my bed daydreaming, an idea came to me for a Jefferson Junior High personal growth event—“Personality Week” would benefit the girls of Jefferson; it would consist of inspirational talks from prominent local women, beauty and fashion events, and a contest for the title of “Miss Personality.” I called my girlfriends Veta and Dorethia to help flesh out the details, and somehow we convinced the school to actually put on Personality Week. Two of the speakers we recruited were the artist wife of one of our English teachers and a nurse who was married to my family doctor. The doctor’s wife was especially memorable because she arrived in a powder-blue Lincoln Continental convertible with a white leather interior and elegant suicide doors. That swanky car was as inspiring to me as anything she said during her talk about how to achieve professional success.

As commentator of our Personality Week fashion show, I practiced the sophisticated delivery I admired in television hosts and local TV news anchors. Even though Personality Week was a scaled-down version of my daydream, it was a big enough deal that I didn’t even care that I had no shot at being voted Miss Personality. I was too much of a mouthy show-off to win a popularity contest. In fact, the girl who won was a popular hairdresser who had been a stylist to a thriving clientele at her family’s salon since she was twelve. Veta, Dorethia, and I were satisfied with the outcome. After all, Veta remarked one winter day as we trudged the icy two-mile trek from Jefferson to Lakeside, “We’re too smart to be really popular. Most of the kids we know couldn’t even fathom the things we talk about.” It was certainly an immodest statement, and probably untrue, but we wrapped ourselves in it like an oversized blanket and huddled in its warmth. We girls of homeroom 202 were at least smart enough to stick together.

The incongruity is that the environment in which we flourished was at least 99 percent black. In high school, where the kids of 202 would later find ourselves among very few other black students in college prep courses, it was easy to see that our de facto segregated junior high was indeed unequal. We had received enrichment assistance; the “white” schools had received more. Just as Michigan had so many lakes that even the projects could be built at the water’s edge, there was so much factory money fueling the school district that even “black” schools could get a few extras.

Still, there was a benefit to being in a virtually all-black school—at Jefferson we could compete fairly to do whatever our talents would allow. In high school, the teachers’ imaginations could not stretch far enough to envision any of us playing the leads in the school musical or the children’s play put on by Pontiac Central High each year. At Jefferson, even as Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus and Dr. King marched into our awareness, we were thriving in a school where the only white faces belonged to teachers.

I later tapped this experience as the basis of my first ad campaign for the UniWorld Group. The campaign was created to support historically black colleges. Through my research, I learned that most of the towering figures of black America had been educated in all-black environments. Some of them wrote essays for the campaign, detailing the benefits of their undergraduate educations. Jesse Jackson played college quarterback—a position denied to blacks at white schools. Astronaut Ron McNair credited his black college counselor with making him believe he had the intelligence to major in physics and earn a doctorate at MIT. The campaign’s first print ad featured a handsome black Cyrano de Bergerac. The campaign was tagged, America’s Black Colleges: Are You Smart Enough to Go? My years at Jefferson had taught me that in segregation, there could be a surprising benefit: freedom from discrimination.

Decades later, my experience as an advertising creative working in an African American agency would amplify the same contradiction, which persists to this day. In those junior high days, though, the inconsistency flew below my radar. I was too busy enjoying success to negotiate better terms.