And Maria did want Juan to study at school. She was passionate about it. “You want a better life, you get an education,” she told him, time and again. And maybe if Juan had been big and strong he wouldn’t have listened to her so much, but a little voice inside him seemed to tell him she was right. So though he played with the other kids in the street, he’d often pretend to be more tired than he was and go back indoors to study.

Juan and his mother lived in two dingy rooms on Lexington Avenue, near 116th street. Though there were Catholic schools, Juan, like most Puerto Ricans, went to the public school. There were several kinds of kid at his school, and depending who they were, one could usually predict where they lived. The black kids lived west of Park, the Puerto Ricans from Park to Pleasant, and the Italians, whose families had usually been in Harlem longest, from east of Pleasant. There were Jewish kids in that school too, and several of the teachers were Jewish.

Juan was very fortunate in his school, because if one chose to take advantage of it, the teaching there was good, and Juan was happy enough. He found that most of the work came to him easily, especially mathematics, for which he seemed to have a natural talent.

It didn’t take him long to make friends, and one of the kids he spent time with was a Jewish boy named Michael. And it was Michael who said to him one day, “When I get out of here, my parents hope I can get to Stuyvesant.” Juan didn’t know what Stuyvesant was, so Michael explained to him that the three best high schools in the city for the public-school kids were Hunter, Bronx Science and Stuyvesant down in the Financial District. The schools were free, Michael said, but the exams for entry were tough, and competition was high.

When Juan told his mother about Michael’s plans for high school, he didn’t think such information applied to him. So he was astonished, and rather embarrassed when, the very next day, Maria called at the school and asked one of the Jewish teachers how her son could get to such a place too.

The teacher had looked rather surprised, but a week later, he had taken Juan to one side and asked him a lot of questions about how he liked it at school, what subjects he enjoyed most, and what he hoped for in his future life. And since Juan wanted to please his mother, who worked so hard for him, he said that he really wanted to go to Stuyvesant.

The teacher had looked rather doubtful. At the time Juan had supposed that this was because his grades weren’t high enough, but later he realized that the teacher had been worried because Stuyvesant wasn’t known for taking black Puerto Ricans. “To have any hope,” the teacher told him, “you’ll have to get grades at least as good as your friend Michael.”