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We walked into the vestibule, where my mother was waiting. When she saw my snare drum, the screaming began. She and my father just went at it, with my mother yelling that we needed money for food, not drums, and my father shouting that the boy should have his own instrument. Then my mother looked out the door and signaled to someone across the street. A man got out of his car, walked up the steps, and handed my father his divorce papers.

I never touched the snare drum again, and the rest of the set was never delivered.

And once the divorce was final, my father ignored the child support payments. It was an all-around disaster.

The summer before my senior year at Milton, Gram told me why my father had walked out so many years before. The day he left, she said, the phone rang in our apartment and my mother answered. The caller was a woman who asked for my father. When my mother said he wasn’t home, the caller said, “Tell him our baby needs shoes,” and hung up. The baby was my half-sister, LaShon, and my mother had known nothing about her or my father’s infidelities.

Gram said that friction between my parents had been building for some time before then. My mother had had one or two abortions after I was born—at great risk to her health, because the procedure was still illegal then. She didn’t believe my father could support additional children. When he learned what she had done, he flew into a rage. Their relationship never really recovered.

It is not surprising, in retrospect, that my visits with my father were never that joyful. He was invariably judgmental, as if he wanted to use our limited time together only to size me up. He would stand back and comment on my height, weight, haircut, clothing. He had very traditional views about what boys should do, with sports being high on the list. But I was not particularly athletic. My first real exposure to his beloved football was when our Cub Scout troop took a trip to a Chicago Bears game during a blizzard at Soldier Field, where games were played outside and the fans sat on concrete slabs. I was so frozen I could hardly walk by the time I got off the bus at home, and ever after I was lukewarm about the game, which probably disappointed him. He was also convinced that my mother’s singular mission after their separation was to turn Rhonda and me against him, so whenever we were together he exhaustively catalogued her shortcomings as a wife and mother.

His obsession with race could also be wearing, and his visits to me at Milton were always perilous. Every word, every motion, oozed his disapproval. “Damn,” he said when we drove around the neighborhood. “Everybody lives in a mansion around here.” He met June Elam and approved of her race, but not of her swimming pool. She was too materialistic and “siddidy”—the scornful term blacks used to describe other blacks who were putting on airs. I was afraid to introduce my father to Will or A. O. Smith or any of my other new friends who were white. I wanted to keep him as far away from them as possible.

That could be avoided no longer on graduation day. It was a significant milestone, and I wanted to savor every moment. My mother, Rhonda, Gram, and Poppy drove out together from Chicago to share in it, the first such visit for all but my mom. We were, of course, conspicuously out of place. Most of the ladies wore classic tailored suits with gloves and hats. My grandmother, having just returned from a vacation on Waikiki (which was her and Poppy’s first time on an airplane), wore a colorful Hawaiian muu-muu.

I had invited my father out of courtesy but admit to being relieved that he never replied, and I assumed he would not show up. Then, on the big day, while my family, friends, and I were having breakfast on the front lawn of Hallowell House, he appeared, grinning broadly if a little awkwardly. That familiar tension returned in an instant. I flashed back to the drum set debacle.

We made it through the graduation ceremony without a scene, but on our drive to June’s house