Joyce’s Reviews > The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell > Status Update

I’d be worried my children would be like me, you know. Have my eyes.

“They should be so lucky,” she said.

“Lucky?”

“Yes. They made you the person you are, and I happen to believe you’re a very good person, Sam Hill.”

I’d applied to the University of California schools, which had negligible tuition for California residents and were a better fit for my family’s budget.

This time we didn’t need to leave six inches for the Holy Spirit, as we did in grammar school.

If there was one thing I had learned about my mother, it was that she did not make idle threats.

“No way, young man. You do not call a young lady on the phone to ask her to the prom. You drive to her house and ask her proper.”

In hindsight, the trustees couldn’t very well have done that, not after passing me over. It would have been a tacit admission that they’d had ulterior motives for not choosing me in the first place and, perhaps, an admission that their motives for choosing Ernie had also not been honorable.

“you could look at it like you’d be opening the door for other kids of color.”

“Those kids will open that door on their own, in the classroom,” Mr. Cantwell said. “Just as you have done.”

Discrimination is difficult, because in its worst form, it is not overt. It is subtle.

My mother had spent her life advocating for me, ensuring that I received the same opportunities as any other child, and her maternal instinct, finely honed from those years, would always be to protect me. But at this moment I knew she was worried as to whether she could protect me from myself.

that guy, he’s not the guy you have to worry about. The ones to worry about are the ones who cloak their discrimination behind some other excuse so you can’t call them out.

Had it been left to her, I would have been enrolled in the local chapter of AA and never allowed to leave the house again. But that moment in the backyard, when my father called me a man, had been my rite of passage. He was telling me that I needed to make my own decisions in life, and I needed to decide for myself what type of person I intended to become, independent of what others thought of me.