Isaiah tried, but he had not been chosen. Isaiah was fed and cared for, but always roughly. My mother frequently asked him if he didn’t have the sense God gave him. He was slight for his age, with skin the color of milk chocolate and teeth that stayed perfect until he was about fifteen and lost one in a fight. One time, she asked him to take out the trash in her abrupt way, and twenty minutes later, when he still hadn’t returned from out front where we took our garbage, she sent me out to look for him. I found him intently watching a crow that had somehow blundered into a vacant lot next door and was hopping from pile of trash to pile of trash. His face was shining when he turned to me. “Jerome, look. Remember the crows back home, how they’d caw so loud? You could hear ’em for miles.” He sighed. “It’s beautiful, ain’t it?”

I grabbed his arm. “Your butt’s gonna be beautiful when Mama gets finished with it. What you doing standing out here so long?”

“I dunno. I saw that bird, and then I just couldn’t move. It reminded me of all the birds back home. I don’t miss Daddy, but I sure do miss it there,” he said thoughtfully. My mother gave us both a couple of hard whacks with a hairbrush when we came back in for having taken so long. Isaiah’s eyes remained fixed in the middle distance as she hit him. He never cried.

By the time I was twelve, most of my evenings were spent reading and doing homework. My mother would sit literally at my elbow, her breath soft and rasping through the ill-lit room. I was already well into a kind of reading and study she could not fully comprehend with her fourth-grade education, but she sat near me as though her mere presence would spur me to greater achievement. I could feel the weight of her desire with every page I turned. One such evening, Isaiah came into the room clutching a math text, a hopeful look on his face. He approached us as though from a great distance. “Jerome, you did fractions last year, right?” he asked, his voice hesitant and shy.