What I remember best about that day was not the school’s beauty or its expensive amenities, but how different my mother seemed while we were there. At home, she still wore jeans and T-shirts, short skirts and sleeveless tops, cowboy boots or spike-heeled shoes. In her work attire, she looked like what she was: a sexy cocktail waitress with a keen grasp of what an extra inch of exposed thigh or cleavage could be worth in tips. That day at Yeatman, however, she wore a prim short-sleeved, knee-length blue dress and a pair of tan patent leather flats I’d never seen before. Her hair, usually sprayed out, lay flat and neatly brushed. All of the men we encountered—Coach Baldwin, the teachers who stopped to greet us in the hallways, the coaches in the gym—treated her with polite deference. I’d never heard my mother referred to as “ma’am” before. The whole picture was jarring, and, I thought, more than a bit deceiving. But I had only ever seen one side of her—the waitress, the unwed single mother, the drinker and smoker. I had forgotten, or perhaps never really understood, that she had grown up around the kind of people who sent their boys to places like Yeatman. Indeed, in her life before my arrival, she’d been one of them.

At the end of our tour, Coach Baldwin led us back to the admissions office. My mother sat at a desk, filling out a form, while I flipped through a copy of the alumni magazine. When my mother was through, Coach Baldwin handed me a cellophane bag full of Yeatman Y-embossed knickknacks: buttons, stickers, a T-shirt, pencils and a sharpener, and a foam finger.

“How would you like to go to a school like that?” my mother asked as we began the drive home in her Chevy Cavalier.

Truth be told, I didn’t give the first thought to how out of place I would be at Yeatman. Nor did I question the expense involved, or why the opportunity had been extended to me. I could only think how lovely it all was—the brightness of the white columns—how clean everything seemed, how peaceful, how stately and noble.

“Sure,” I said.

If not for that day, I would never have left East Nashville for Belle Meade, nor would I have understood how much the conditions of life in one world depend on the whims of those who live in another.

two

A note on stationery embossed with a gilded Gothic Y arrived in the mail at our apartment a few weeks later, inviting me to join the Yeatman class of 1988. Admission letter in hand, I went to tell Terrence.

“My cousin went there for football,” Terrence said. “Those folks Grand-Lou used to work for sent their boys there. That’s a rich white boy school, Charlie.”

“It’s not all white,” I said. “You could go there too.”