We didn’t put an offer on the house on Black Boy Lane. Maybe it was the dated kitchen, maybe we just weren’t ready to commit, or maybe it was the street name, after all. I’m African American; my ancestors were in the bellies of those ships. And the street’s name conjured up a time in America not so long ago when every black man, no matter how old, was known as “boy.” (I mean “not so long ago” literally. “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,” Kentucky representative Geoff Davis said, in 2008, about America’s nuclear arsenal. “That boy” was Barack Obama.)
