Our home was a shack, especially when compared to the two- and three-story palaces that lay just at the other end of town. Money was a constant discussion: lack of it, what to do with it, where it was going to come from. It was always a problem. The white parents on television were always canoodling, doting on their children, and smiling at one another with an air of playful romance, but my mother didn’t like my father at all and it was fairly evident.
