My mother never showed much interest in my education until, when I was in eighth grade, she received a hospital bill for eight hundred dollars after one of my regular beatings outside school resulted in a broken collarbone.

“We’ve got to get you out of that school,” she said.

One morning not long after, she woke me up early and ordered me to dress in the clothes usually reserved for Christmas Eve and Easter morning church visits.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“There’s something I want you to see,” she said.

The Yeatman School lay at the end of a narrow drive lined by hickory trees, such that it couldn’t be seen from the road; the only markers of its presence were two weathered stone columns, each with the letter Y engraved on flat concrete panels. The obscurity of this entrance suggested that one wasn’t meant to be able to find the school without being told where to look. The forest surrounding the campus—the Grove, they call it—was so dense that I felt, after passing through the shadowy woods and coming upon the white columns bathed in sunlight, that if I left and came back to the same spot, I might not find it there.

Coach Baldwin, a blond, lantern-jawed statue of a man with the stiff, erect posture of an antique nutcracker, toured us around. My mother blushed when he held the door for her and called her “ma’am.” It took me a while to process the fact that Coach Baldwin was, for lack of a more accurate expression, courting us, trying to persuade us of the school’s worthiness.