JOURNAL ENTRY, JULY 1968: Walking to work, I came upon an old woman sitting in front of a restaurant’s dark window, her wig squarely in place, her black-stockinged legs crossed at the ankles, the locket against her shapeless dark dress making it look even more like a shroud. Her massive handbag lay on its side like a dead thing as she stared into the distance with the face of someone who knows that what she is waiting for will never come. Only the first of my exposures was any good because my hand started to shake. I felt so certain I was seeing my future that it took every bit of reserve not to grasp that abandoned figure and ask, “Tell me! Does she ever come back?” Looking at that woman birthed the same desperation that filled me earlier this week when I put you on the Cleveland plane. If I want to stop this feeling from coming back, I know something has to change.

Arriving to the house on Fernvale Street, I was ushered in to lemonade and freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Ever since my grandparents had reneged on the whole “call us anytime and we’ll send for you” promise, I’d been mentally honing the righteous indignation I planned to unleash when I saw them; but now I couldn’t muster the necessary venom. I wasn’t nine anymore. Four years had passed since people across the country were calling me a degenerate. I was simply thirteen and not getting along with my mother. Even I had to admit it wasn’t quite the same thing.

My first week in Cleveland, I wrote Kaja a letter about everything that had happened since our fight: my ill-fated phone call to my grandparents, the state of affairs with my mother, my loneliness, my grandmother’s flavorless cooking, my grandfather’s constant fatigue—and my fear, since Kaja had moved to her father’s place before we’d made up, that I would never see my best friend again. Before the end of July, a letter arrived in return. Kaja loved living with her dad and wished she’d done it sooner. She was spending the summer at a Movement school that a friend of her father’s had set up in the back of a bookstore, where she was learning about black history and black art, her letter listing a bunch of names I’d never heard of. It was only her and six other kids, and four of those were the teacher’s. Because she was the oldest, she got to help teach math and spelling to the younger ones. For the first time, she felt like she was learning about real things and real people. She wished I was there with her. It’d be good for me, plus some of the other kids needed to see that there were a few righteous white people in the world.