There were no black people in my neighborhood. When I was a girl. Just a bunch of dirty kids wearing clothes that belonged to someone else first. That never fit right. Cheap rubber shoes that slipped in the rain. It rained all the time. No mom or no dad. We lived with our grandparents because one or more of our family members over 15 were in jail. Just kids who knew what day to bother standing in line at the food bank, and who would have never thought to make fun of someone on welfare.

There were no black people in my neighborhood. When I was a girl. And my best friend who lived up the street and I used to jump rope behind her house and our brothers used to play rough games in the grass. All of their names started with D, after their father. And there were more of them than I could keep track of. Her father always smelled like cheap alcohol. That's not meta-reflection. I knew it like my own father, who I hadn't seen in several years. Cheap alcohol and gasoline. Sometimes, when no one was watching, the group of us would get together and light fires. We all suffered from a desperate desire to make something burn.

There were no black people in my neighborhood, until the one we all called Pooh-pooh ran into my brother-who then fell a few feet from the elevated yard where we played onto the rocks and concrete below. I remember the group of us crowding around him lying there, shrieking and laughing, like a mob of crazed wild dogs. Our own destruction some necessary fever. Until my grandmother loaded all of us into the car and rushed my older brother and his cracked bloodied face to the emergency room. Where we sat for hours without insurance for them to tie little knots of dark heavy thread near his hairline. Afterward, I used my orange plastic barrette to hold back his hair.

Until the doctor came into the room and asked my grandmother if she wanted to call the police-to press charges. For what?, she asked the man politely. You know how violent these blacks can be, he said, nodding in our direction. There were no black people in my neighborhood.