ABSTRACT
At the age of 11, I was one of seven children living in a five-roomed apartment in the South Bronx inhabited by my mother, my grandmother, and sometimes aunts and cousins. This was our fourth move since I was born in Spanish Harlem in 1954. My mother had moved us from borough to borough each time her intuition told her that the neighborhood was too menacing to stay. We had just left East New York, Brooklyn where, as in most inner-city neighborhoods, the tension of racism was rampant. The self-hatred fueled by racism caused people of color to turn on each other. Family-to-family annihilation was reminiscent of scenes in The Godfather. I did not understand the meaning of this, nor did I have a sense of how I would find it, but I was deeply aware of how I sometimes wished I would disappear. My light-skinned, green-eyed, Shirley Temple curled self made me adorable to Whites and Latinos trying to assimilate to the mainstream position. From this sadly “privileged” place, I watched my brothers and sisters suffer. It made no sense to me that adults called my sister ugly. She was told she was mean and would never amount to anything, while I was treated like a china doll, a cherished object by the adults around us.
