Black girl from the ’hood doing right, working hard, playing by the rules. Making good. Meritocracy, dig? Except that Macy’s grandmother was smart as a whip and educated, too—a middle-school math teacher who owned a home, however modest, back in Trinidad, which Macy visited most summers of her life. Macy’s mother’s early death was a tragedy, sure, but her life was a cakewalk compared to, say, Jane’s. Jane was truly poor—developing-country poor, not American poor—and she was abandoned by her dad and mom only to have her grandmother die on her. Jane works her butt off at least as much as Macy
...more
Macy is the right kind of poor.
