“Spurgeon, what can I do? If you took all my money and split it up among all the brothers in just one tenement block of Harlem, there wouldn’t be a single man there who wouldn’t run out of cash sooner or later. You’ve got to realize that men are all the same. Remember that, boy: all the same. Whatever their color, the only way they’re divided is into those who are bone lazy and the ones who are willing to work.”

“You can’t believe that,” Spur said in disgust.

“Of course I believe it. Nobody’s going to be able to help them unless they get off their rusty-dusties and help themselves.”

“Without education or enough opportunities, how can they help themselves?”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“You. You were a million-to-one long shot. To the rest of us you’re a freak, don’t you realize that?”

If anything in his young clumsiness he had meant it as a compliment, but the bitter despair in his voice sounded like scorn to the man. For months after that despite their mutual efforts there was a thin wall of glass between them. That summer—Spur was then sixteen—he ran away and shipped out to sea, telling himself he was trying to find out what his dead sailor father had been but in reality testing himself against the legend of his stepfather’s independence at an early age. When he came back that fall he and Calvin were able to pick it right up again. The old warmth was there, and neither ever again dared ruin it by resuming the argument about their race. Eventually, the reason for argument died in the boy’s mind, and he came to think of the inhabitants of places like Amsterdam Avenue in the way he thought of white folks.

They were “those people.”

Ultimately, life with Calvin confused him badly. In Riverdale, black of skin and white of world, he neither knew what he was nor what kind of man he was expected to become. He was aware nowadays of the racial pride he gave Calvin (even the Justins of Justin, Georgia, never had a doctor in the family). But years after he had left Riverdale Spur thought immediately of the apartment house with the white doorman when he heard the Godfrey Cambridge comedic routine about the wealthy Negroes who, when informed a nigger lurked nearby, shrieked and looked around wildly, screaming in great anguish, “Where! Where? Where?”

The little room under the hospital roof was unbearably hot and far removed from both Amsterdam Avenue and the comfortable air-conditioning of Riverdale. He got up and peered from the window; the sixth floor of the hospital, he saw, was recessed. Directly below, the roof of the fifth story jutted out about ten feet, and after a moment he took a pillow and a blanket and dropped them out the window. Then, carrying the guitar and the carton of beer, he clambered over the sill.

There was a slight salt breeze, and he lay gratefully on the roof with the pillow against the wall. Below him were the fantastic lights of the city and over on the right began the slice of broad darkness that was the Atlantic Ocean and far out a steady yellow flicker like a feisty wink, a lighthouse.