“You bastards,” he told the city.

He had stayed at the Statler for three days while answering apartment ads in the Herald and the Globe. Real estate people had reacted warmly to calls from Dr. Robinson, but always when he showed up to look at the apartment it had just been rented.

“You ever hear of Crispus Attucks?” he asked the last Realtor.

“Who?” the man had said nervously.

“He was a colored man, like me. He was the first American killed in your goddamned Revolution.”

The man had nodded brightly and smiled with relief as he walked away.

There must be nice buildings that have been broken, he thought.

Well, he told himself, maybe he had been looking at apartments that were too nice. The thing was, he could afford a nice place. A check was going to come once a month from Uncle Calvin, even though he had explained that now he would get paid by the hospital. They had argued at length until he had understood that the third Thursday of each month, when he signed that check, Calvin would be giving away two things, money, which he valued because there had been a time when he hadn’t had it, and love, the most miraculous thing in his life.

Old Uncle, he thought tenderly. Why haven’t I been able to call him my father?

There was a time, remembered clearly but as a bad dream, when they had been poor niggers, before his mother had married Calvin and they had become wealthy Negroes. He had slept in a cot next to his mother’s bed in a small dreary room on West 172nd Street. There was faded brown wallpaper with watermarks around the top edge of one of the walls, left there long ago when something had overflowed on the floor above or a steampipe had leaked. He always thought of the marks as tearstains because when he cried his mother would point to them and tell him that if he didn’t stop bawling his cheeks would have marks on them like the ones on the wallpaper. He remembered a creaky rockingchair with a worn plaid pad, the two-burner gas range that worked badly so that water took a long time to boil, the small card table on which no food could be left overnight because of the hungry things that came out of the walls.

He remembered these things only when he could not elude their memory. He preferred to think of Momma, of how she had been when she was young.

When he was small his mother had left him each day with Mrs. Simpson, who lived in three rooms on the floor below and had three children of her own and a relief check instead of a husband or a job. Momma got no relief check. She worked as a waitress in a whole series of restaurants while he was a boy, the labor leaving her with bad feet and thickened legs. Even so, she was exceedingly pretty. She had given birth to him when she was a young girl, and above the spoiled legs her body had ripened but remained slim and hard.