from Meditations on History (1980)

I think that what started me on the road to being a writer was searching for books about black people in the library of Edison Jr./Sr. High School in Fresno, California, in the ‘50’s and being too embarrassed, too shamed to ask for help from the librarian. I don’t remember precisely how old I was—I entered Edison as a twelve-year-old seventh-grader and graduated five years later in 1962 and much of that time is a blur—maybe thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen. I do know I was having a lot of trouble—with my mother, the one sister who remained at home, my friends, myself. I felt abandoned by my two older sisters, who had married and seldom returned for visits, out of touch with my teachers, even those who befriended me. What did they know about being black, being on welfare, being solicited for sex by older black men in the neighborhood and the old white ones who cruised our streets on the weekends? And though I know now that need must have been written all over me, I would have died before exposing my family life or my longing to them.

Much as I loved Louisa May Alcott and Frank Yerby, they no longer transported me as they once had done. So, on infrequent class trips to the library (I never went unless forced to by class requirements, for I was set off enough from my classmates by my grades and my middle-class aspirations in my obviously underclass body), I roamed the room, surreptitiously studying the shelves, hoping to spot a title that would identify the books as Black. I read Black Boy, an obvious title, but worse than useless for me: it wasn’t just that I didn’t have to cope with that kind of overt racism in Fresno, California, the heart of the farm-rich San Joaquin Valley. I could identify only in part with Wright’s conflicts with his family. I would have given a lot for just such signs of caring as his family’s attempts to force him even into the Tom role. Rather than prizing my differences, I despised them and sought during this time to conform, only to discover that even my attempts at conformity set me apart.

I was led, almost inevitably, I think, to the autobiographies of women entertainers—Eartha Kitt, Katherine Dunham, Ethel Waters. The material circumstances of their childhood were so much worse than mine; they too had had to cope with early and forced sex and sexuality, with mothers who could not express love in the terms that they desperately needed. Yet they had risen above this, turned their difference into something that was respected in the world beyond their homes. I, in the free North, could do no less than endure.

And I did, helped immensely, immeasurably by my sister, Ruby, who returned home after the break-up of her marriage; she was eighteen, her daughter almost three. It is almost twenty years since this happened, yet I have never ceased to admire her and be amazed at the change “Ruise” wrought in my life. She worked as a maid/cook for a white family five days a week (and got twenty-five dollars, an amount that was later doubled when she moved to a new job with a new family), attended night school four nights a week to earn the high school diploma that pregnancy and marriage had forced her to abandon, partied at least two nights a week, took care of her daughter and counseled and guided me through the shoals of adolescence that had almost wrecked her own life. She paid for this schedule with ill-health which eventually forced her to quit work and go on welfare—but not before she had that high school diploma.

After my mother’s death—I was then sixteen going on seventeen—I was placed in Ruise’s custody and the money she received for my care—plus what we got from occasional field work—picking cotton, cutting grapes, holiday work as a stock clerk in...