Becoming

Ronnell? I don’t remember which one of us proposed that we meet outside my house one afternoon to g ...

energizing to ponder, almost as ritual. I understand now that even a happy marriage can be a vexation, ...

M 5 y mother ultimately did go back to work, right about the time I began high school, catapulti ...

costing my parents. Craig’s teachers were brown-robed priests who went by “Father.” About 80 per ...

There were about nineteen hundred kids at Whitney Young, and from my point of view they appeared u ...

C us—me and Terri and Chiaka—landed here because we were smart like them? The truth is I didn’t know. ...

M earned to gain access to the tall corporate castles lining Van Buren. But I did like how determined they l ...

I loved any subject that involved writing and labored through precalc. I was a half-decent French student. ...

My parents never once spoke of the stress of having to pay for college, but I knew enough to appreciate t ...

In the manner of all high schoolers everywhere, my friends and I liked to loiter. We loiter ...

the country, mesmerizing crowds with thundering calls for black people to shake off the undermining ghett ...

working parents, the odds were usually better at the Jacksons’ house, where Mrs. Jackson had both a wood-pa ...

W was something about it, and about politics in general, that made me queasy. For one thing, I was someon ...

instantly blotted this experience out. I don’t remember her age or race or how she happened to ...

professors, entrepreneurs, artists and writers, pioneering doctors and researchers. Some (though not enough ...

M 6 y dad drove me to Princeton in the summer of 1981, across the flat highways connecting Illino ...

sort of distraction from my studies. During holiday breaks and over the summer, though, he came home to ...

would knock me sideways, that I’d get swept into the upending, tsunami-like rush that seemed ...

It turned out there were a lot of things I had yet to learn about life, or at least life on the Prin ...

Attached to all of this was a new vocabulary, one I needed to master. What was a precept? What was a ...