With Aunt Vivian’s help, she found an inexpensive, ugly apartment and a job cleaning floors in an office building. That done, she began her great work of helping me eradicate every trace of Georgia country soil from not only my manner, but my very spirit. If I said “ain’t,” she was on me with a hairbrush. If I slipped and let my vowels come out at too leisurely a pace, she was there in an instant, with a single tight look that reminded me to speak more crisply. Her voice and manners drip with the honey and molasses of my childhood until this very day but she had come to believe, in part correctly, that that was what held her back. She was determined that I would not suffer the same fate. A hundred—no, a thousand times a day she ordered me not to end up like my father. She called him “a no-’count hood with no hope and no sense. Be croppin’ for pennies until the day he dies. I wish I’d known how he was gonna end up before we got married. I sure wouldn’t have stayed with his butt as long as I did.” But sometimes, when I had to get up late at night to use the toilet, I’d see her sitting in the pool of yellow light cast by the one light bulb in our kitchen, gazing at the old photo she later gave me, her gaze gentle and regretful. Those were the only moments I ever saw her betray any softness—moments when she thought I couldn’t see her.

We had come to Chicago at a propitious time, the late 1950s, when the Negro communities were just beginning to shift under the weight of the poverty and ignorance that flattened them. It is worse now, I know, but then there was a glimmering, a faint belief that if we just held on and educated ourselves for the days to come, there would be a change. My mother had decided that I would be ready when the change came.

She had found a willing student. Not once did I buck her efforts at changing the way I spoke, cleaning up my language, making sure I did well in school. If anything, I redoubled them. I knew almost from the moment of our arrival that it was incumbent upon me to change. The torment that had made my mother run made me desperate to learn, desperate to wash myself clean of the red clay that I had been born to. Education seemed the surest way to eradicate it. So I gave myself over to learning in every respect that I could.