From Chapter One, “A Stripe Of Sky”
Netta’s family has moved into five rented rooms beside the barber shop. Her mother sets about making the place their own. On a block where women judge a household by its front step, that work begins where everyone can see it.
“Behind the middle room, the kitchen, big enough for the table and all of us, with a real stove; and off the kitchen the back room over the yard, Dom and Joey’s. Five rooms. After two rented rooms off Ninth Street it was a kingdom, and my mother took possession of it like a returning government: everything had a place by nightfall, the pot on its nail, the rent money in the coffee tin, and within the week she had scrubbed the marble front step on her knees with a brush, twice, as if it were the threshold of a church. The women of Annin Street judged one another by their steps, and my mother’s step was the whitest on the block inside of a month, and nobody who saw it ever pitied us for a minute, which was the entire point. And yet with us she was gentle, always: a voice at the edge of sleep, a hand on a hot forehead. She scrubbed the world hard and her children soft.”