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sisters.
    George Myers was a smallish, brown-skinned man who wore thick glasses. He greeted me formally and shook my hand, which I liked. I met his wife, Tommy. The oldest boy, also named George, was my full brother, and he was the same light color I was. He was called Mickey.
    Mickey had slightly reddish hair that was straighter than mine. He was about my height despite the fact that I was two and a half years younger. We hit it off very quickly, and he was clearly glad to have a friend in his new and, for him, very strange city. Itsoon became clear to me that George Myers was not as well off as the Deans, probably because of the size of his family. Besides Mickey there was a set of twins, Horace and Harriet, and a girl, Gloria.
    I knew I had three other full sisters—Gertrude, Ethel, and Imogene—who were not living in New York, and I was beginning to sort out my complex family ties. The woman who had given birth to me had had five children, of which I was the next to last, fitting in between Mickey and Imogene. These were my full siblings. The others were my half sisters and brothers. In effect, however, although I was not biologically related, I was raised in the Dean household as the baby of the family, and considered the Deans to be my “real” family.
    The other person who now entered my life was my uncle Lee, finally out of jail. He looked a lot like my adoptive father, Herbert Dean. Uncle Lee had a habit of talking out of the side of his mouth. I asked him why he did that.
    â€œSo the screws can’t see you talking,” he said.
    The who?
    He explained that the screws were the prison guards. He had been in jail so long that talking out of the side of his mouth just came naturally. Just as naturally, I started talking out of the side of my mouth.
    Mama restricted my activities that summer because of my having had my appendix out. I also didn’t get any beatings that summer for the same reason. Not that I really deserved any, because there was only one thing I did that remotely suggested that I was on the wrong track. Richard Aisles (whose son turned out to be a fine trumpet player and jazz musician) lived in the next building. Richard had hurt his eyes by staring at the sun, which provoked the other kids on the block. Johnny Lightbourne, a boy close to my age, suggested we beat him up, but then we read in the Amsterdam News about a black man in the South who had been lynched by hanging. So we decided to hang Richard.
    We took Richard down into the church basement, threw a rope over the railing that ran around the gym, and were stringing him up when Reverend Abbott came along. Reverend Abbott was a young white minister from Georgia who was assigned to our church for the summer. When he caught us lynching Richard, he turned about five shades whiter.
    â€œYou can’t—that’s—I don’t believe…” He sputtered on and on. I guessed he had come from an area of the country where being lynched meant something a lot more serious than we knew about.
    He went to each of our homes and told our mothers, who were unimpressed with our ability to hangRichard. Then he made us whitewash a wall, which was interesting, as none of us had ever done that before, and we proceeded to get whitewash all over ourselves. Even if I hadn’t still been recuperating from my appendectomy, I don’t think I would have received a beating for a simple hanging.
    Beatings came easily in our neighborhood. None of our parents, with the possible exception of Robert Boone’s mom, minded tearing our butts up. My mother used to tell me that she was going to do such a job on my particular butt that I would have to go down to Macy’s to buy a new behind. The Boones were ultra-light-skinned blacks who had professional jobs and were upward bound. Light skin was a definite plus in our community, and it was common to talk in a negative manner about a person with very dark skin.
    Beatings were not