He couldn’t imagine Momma doing that woman-thing that Fay had done, spreading her legs and squirming all wet and excited like that, and yet he knew somewhere deep inside that she probably did do that, sometimes. Roe-Ellen always knew a lot of men and every once in a while she would pay Mrs. Simpson to let Spurgeon sleep overnight in her place with her two boys, Petey and Ted. One man in particular, Elroy Grant, a big handsome man who ran a dry-cleaning store on Amsterdam Avenue, kept hanging around Momma. He smelled of strong whiskey and paid no attention to Spurgeon, who hated him. He chased around with a lot of women and one day Spurgeon found Roe-Ellen on the bed crying and when he asked Mrs. Simpson what was the matter she told him Elroy had married a widow who owned a saloon in Borough Hall and had closed the dry cleaning store and moved to Brooklyn. Momma moped around for weeks after that, then finally she snapped out of it and announced that Spur would have to be especially grown-up because she had enrolled in a secretarial course after work and would be spending four nights a week at the Patrick Henry High School on upper Broadway. The nights she didn’t go to school he always made certain to be home; they became his holidays.

Roe-Ellen attended the classes for two years and when she had completed the course she could type 72 words a minute and take a hundred words a minute in the Gregg system of shorthand. She expected to have a hard time finding a job but two weeks after she went out looking for work she was hired for the secretarial pool at the American Eagle Life Insurance Company. Every night she came home starry-eyed and with tales of new wonders, the fast elevator, the wonderful girls in the secretarial pool, the number of letters she had done that day, the short hours, the joys of resting her legs while putting in a full working day.

One day she came home looking almost frightened. “Honey, I saw the President today.”

“Eisenhower?”

“No. Mr. Calvin J. Priest, President of the American Eagle Life Insurance Company. Spur, honey, he’s colored!”

It didn’t make sense. “You must have made a mistake, Momma. He’s probably a real dark ofay.”

“I’m telling you he’s as black as you are. And if Calvin J. Priest can do something wonderful like becoming president of the American Eagle Life Insurance Company, why shouldn’t Spurgeon Robinson? Baby, baby, we’re going to see the land of milk and honey yet. I promise you!”

“I believe you, Momma.”

Their vehicle to the land of milk and honey, of course, was Uncle Calvin.

By the time he was a man grown, Spurgeon knew Calvin Priest, as he was after Spurgeon had met him and as he had been before their meeting. He was able to obtain this knowledge because Calvin was a communicative man who used his voice to make contact, reaching out toward Roe-Ellen and her son with words like hands. The bits and pieces of his life were gleaned by Spurgeon over a long period of time, during many conversations, after listening to unending reminiscences and rambling stories, until he had the true picture of the man, his step-father.