Unwed mothers and absent fathers were not unusual in the Montague Village Apartments. In school, I suffered far less persecution for being a bastard than for being one of the few white boys in a black neighborhood and school. When I got old enough to start asking who and where my daddy was, my mother told me he was a soldier who never came home from the war. When I asked more questions—why we had no photographs of my father, where were my grandparents, where did we come from—my mother looked at Sunny.

“Well, honey,” Sunny said, “your daddy knocked your momma up, and your granddaddy kicked her out.”

By then, Sunny’s dreams of stardom had stalled in an airport bar, where she sang for tips. Her stage was a small riser equipped with a microphone and a PA system running a loop of country classics like “Crazy,” “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” and “I Will Always Love You.”

When I was old enough to be left with one of the neighbors, my mother started waiting tables. She worked at a diner until she turned eighteen, whereupon she moved up to cocktailing in a honky-tonk on Lower Broadway, which back then was all strip clubs, junkies, and hustlers. Eventually, she migrated to Café Cabernet, a dim restaurant in Midtown, also known as Café Divorcée for its popularity as a pickup spot. Every time I visited the place, the stereo seemed to be playing something by Steely Dan or Supertramp. My mother was a beauty, both sensuous and demure, with a curvy figure just on the right edge of plumpness. She was a bit heedless, but smarter and tougher than she looked. Tips were good enough for the three of us to upgrade to a three-bedroom apartment at Montague Village.

We children of Montague were passed around from mother to mother, depending on who wasn’t working at the time. None of them appeared to notice where we were or what we were doing. I spent most of my time with Terrence Robie, who lived across the hall with his grandmother Louella, a maid for a pair of families across the river in Belle Meade. We were raised from infancy in such close proximity that we might as well have been brothers. Though we were only a few months apart in age, by the time we reached middle school, Terrence had grown six inches taller and at least thirty pounds heavier than I. He began to protect me as if I actually were his brother. Terrence could not save me from all of the abuse I suffered for being the smallest and meekest of the few white students in the halls of W. E. B. DuBois Middle, but he made things less miserable than they might otherwise have been.