I suppose it seems strange that I did not defy my mother. I suppose it seems strange that I made no effort to save my gentle brother. I suppose it might even seem strange that she would be so cruel to her own flesh and blood. But who had ever been kind to her? Not her husband. Not her sister. Not even her children, really. She never taught us that skill. She had no idea of kindness. If she had ever craved it, she had to put that craving aside in order to do what was necessary to get away from my father and pilot us through our difficult lives. One time, many years later, after it had become clear she could no longer live alone and she had been moved into a Chicago nursing home, I asked her if she remembered Isaiah asking for help with his homework that time. At first she denied it, but then her eyes focused and became clear. “Sure I remember. I remember now. You were busy. You were always so busy, and you didn’t need him botherin’ you. He was just a little boy, come peckin’ ’round botherin’ you all the time. He needed to learn to make his own way Like you did.”

She paused for so long that I thought she had drifted away and was going to stop speaking altogether, as she sometimes did. “Like I did,” she finally said. “Didn’t nobody ever help me. Ain’t nobody you can count on for long. Boy just needed to learn that.” She looked out the tiny window of her room into the gray sky. She said nothing more. For a moment, I felt the same grief and indecision that I had felt all those years ago. But the moment passed. She was done with me, I could see, so I left.

Cicero said, “Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nourished and live.” Circumstance and nature had formed my mother as surely as it has formed me. If it has not formed great kindness or openness within us—well, those are not the only virtues. And they are, after all, the ones that cost us the most.