OF COURSE, ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD David Rasul Evans knew his name though he pretended to forget when his mother, sick and tired of being sick and tired, gave up on it all and decided in 1984 to ship him off to her mother’s people up North. She was fed up with drifting through scorching Missouri one-rooms and efficiencies, not being able to catch another job before one lay her off, not being able to depend on the circle of girlfriends whose predicaments were not much better than hers, certainly not being able to depend on the daddy who loved get-rich-quick schemes more than his son. She had had the number of a cousin who was supposed to alert the brood spread out on Chicago’s South Side that one of theirs was on his way. For how long, she couldn’t say. Just put up with him until I get on my feet, was all she asked.

Of course, that proved to be too much when no one wanted to put up with their own. He would have wanted them to call him Davey, just like his mother had, but the problem was nobody would listen to the child long enough to find that out. He, however, was always within earshot of the latest boarder’s self-aggrandizing tirades about his new mouth and how it was too big to feed. He never failed to notice how he got the smallest portions, the last and shortest turn in recycled bathwater, the narrowest sliver of the shared bed or the end of the couch nobody else wanted to sleep on. He never failed to hear the other cousins crack on him for his ten-dollar jeans or his twenty-dollar shoes. Not to mention the ivory-colored splotches all over his face, body, and hands. No teachers at the eight schools he transferred to in less than eight years bothered to pay him much mind either. He woke up every day in whatever temporary place he was staying, went to school, wilded out with the few other strays in between and after classes, dreamed about nothing, planned for no future because no one took the time to tell him to.

His real mother barely called and she never wrote since she never managed to get on her feet; even though she no longer had the boy tying her down, she was still an uneducated Black woman with no looks and no skills. So by the time David was twelve, he associated both woman and manhood with neglect. By the time he arrived at an aunt and uncle’s in a dilapidated building on King Drive, where he was sent because the couple’s own son had joined the army and left his room vacant, David had packed and repacked his two little bags (he lost the lunchbox at the first distant aunt’s house) eleven times in eight years.