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any opportunity to poke fun at us. He taunted me about my long, skinny legs and gave our baby sister, Debra, the nickname “Hog” because of her jowly cheeks. At the dinner table, I teased Al about being a weakling and called him “Olive Oyl” when he wouldn't eat spinach. That always made Daddy throw his head back and roar.
    My father's favorite pastime was watching sports on TV. On fall football Sundays, he prayed for a San Diego Chargers victory, and whenever their games were televised, he was riveted to his easy chair. He felt a kinship with the Chargers, he said, because his “cousin” Charlie Joiner was the starting wide receiver. One day, after listening to Daddy's familiar speech about Cousin Charlie's inherited athletic brilliance, I pulled my chair close to the TV and noticed the spelling of the name on the back of his jersey.
    “Daddy, his uniform says J-O-I-N-E-R! That's not the way we spell our name. How can he be our cousin?” I asked him.
    “He's a distant cousin,” my father replied confidently. “His side of the family spells it differently, but we're all kin.”
    He was dead serious and no one could challenge him. Questioning my father's word about anything, even something as trivial as Charlie Joiner's relationship to us, was considered talking back—a most serious transgression. That's when we saw the side of his personality that made people fear him.
    The summer before I entered the eleventh grade at Lincoln High, a boy from our rival school, East St. Louis High—a name that we shortened to Eastside in conversation—invited me to a Jackson 5 concert. Ordinarily, Eastsiders and Lincoln students didn't mix. But during the summer, we ran track and played basketball together on a community-league team that competed in Amateur Athletic Union meets around the Midwest. I'd met the boy at track practice and we struck up a casual friendship.
    I was dying to go to that concert. My friends and I knew every word to every one of the Jackson 5 songs. Those concert tickets were like pieces of gold. I would have accepted his invitation on the spot, but I knew I had to get permission.
    “Ask your Daddy,” Momma said. I knew I was doomed.
    “A concert in St. Louis?” Daddy asked. “Who is this boy?” He made it sound like St. Louis was on another continent.
    “He goes to Eastside …”
    “Nope. You're not going out with anybody from Eastside. I went to Lincoln High, you go to Lincoln. We don't deal with people from Eastside, period.”
    I rolled my eyes. “Here we go with that again—”
    Before I finished mumbling, the back of Daddy's massive hand stung my cheek.
    “Don't you talk back to me, girl! The answer is no and that's the end of it.”
    During the 1960s, East St. Louis was a prosperous place, an ail-American city with low unemployment and a bustling economy. We had a Sears store, big grocery stores, a big Woolworth's store—complete with a luncheonette and a long counter—banks, several hospitals and a clutch of locally owned businesses.
    To the strains of “Burn, baby, burn,” the city was rocked by black militant protests, vandalism and arson during the late 1960s. White residents fled the city for outlying suburbs. With their customer base shrinking and their assets threatened, local businesses closed. Eventually, Sears left, too.
    The manufacturing companies with operations in town, including the glass works, the steel mill, the rubber and tire company, the railroad and the stockyards, followed. They relocated to areas where labor costs were cheaper. The moves threw people in my neighborhood, most of whom were union laborers like my father, out of work in droves. By the mid-1970s, East St. Louis's economy was nose-diving. Between 1974 and 1975, the already high unemployment rate skyrocketed from 12 percent to 17 percent. As unemployment rose, crime exploded. Pretty soon, parts of East St. Louis looked like shelled-out war zones and the city suffered from a terrible national