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AFTER GREENWOOD I moved on to Callanan Junior High School for grades seven to nine—the early teen years. Callanan was a much worldlier school. Its catchment area covered a broader cross-section of the city so that its enrollment was roughly half black and half white. For many of us this was our first close-up experience of black kids. Suddenly there were six hundred fellow students who were stronger, fleeter, tougher, braver, hipper, and cannier than we were. This was when you realized for certain something that you had always privately suspected—that you were never going to take Bob Cousy’s place on the Boston Celtics, never going to break Lou Brock’s base-stealing records for the St. Louis Cardinals, never going to be invited to Olympic trials in any sport. You weren’t even going to make the junior varsity softball team now.

This was evident from the very first day when Mr. Schlubb, the pear-shaped PE teacher, sent us all out to run half a dozen laps around a preposterously enormous cinder track. For the Greenwood kids—all of us white, marshmallowy, innately unphysical, squinting unfamiliarly in the bright sunshine—it was a shock to the system of an unprecedented order. Most of us ran as if slogging through quicksand and were gasping for air by the first bend. On the second lap a boy named Willis Pomerantz burst into tears because he had never perspired before and thought he was leaking vital fluids, and three others petitioned to be sent to the nurse. The black kids without exception sailed past us in a jog, including a three-hundred-pound spheroid named Tubby Brown. These kids weren’t just slightly better than us, they were better by another order of magnitude altogether, and it was like this, we would find, in all sports.

Winters at Callanan were spent playing basketball in a dim-lit gymnasium—we seemed to spend hours at it every day—and no white kid I know ever even saw the ball. Honestly. You would just see a sequence of effortless blurs moving about between two or three lanky black kids and then the net would go swish, and you would know to turn around and lope down to the other end of the court. Mostly you just tried to stay out of the way, and never ever raised your hands above your waist, for that might be taken as a sign that you wanted a pass, which was in fact the last thing you wanted. A boy named Walter Haskins once unthinkingly scratched the side of his head near the basket, and the next instant was hit square in the face so hard with a ball that the front of his head went completely concave. They had to use a bathroom plunger to get it back to normal, or so I was told.

The black kids were all immensely tough, too. I once saw an overfed white lummox named Dwayne Durdle foolishly and remorselessly pick on a little black kid named Tyrone Morris in the serving line in the cafeteria, and when Tyrone could take no more, he turned with a look of weariness and sad exasperation and threw a flurry of punches into Durdle’s absorbent face so fast that you didn’t actually see his hands move. All you heard was a kind of rubbery flubba-da-dubba sound and the ping of teeth ricocheting off walls and radiators. As Durdle sank to his knees, glassy-eyed and gurgling, Tyrone thrust an arm far down his throat, grabbed hold of something deep inside, and turned him inside out.

“Goddamn fool muthah-fuckah,” Tyrone said in amazed dismay as he retrieved his tray and continued on to the dessert section.

Mostly, however, there were almost no overt bad feelings between blacks and whites at Callanan. The black kids were poorer than the rest of us more or less without exception, but otherwise were just the same in nearly all respects. They mostly came from solid, hardworking homes. They spoke with identical voices, shopped at the same stores, wore the same clothes, went to the same movies. We were all just kids. Apart from my grandmother asking for nigger babies at Bishop’s, I don’t remember hearing a single racist remark in the whole of my upbringing.

I wouldn’t pretend that we didn