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to favor near beaches. Ours was a particularly lurid aqua.
    The smell of freshly cut grass brings me back there even now, my dad taking pride in our yard with fruit trees—lemons, limes, oranges, Chinese plums, some belonging to us, others in the neighbors’ yards—out back. Our lawn and yard were always extremely well kept, though the chaos of a family with so many young children meant that toys would sometimes be scattered about. My father was especially fond of our lime tree, which grew fruits so large, they looked more like green oranges. He loved to show off those huge limes. Fresh citrus fruits like that remind me of that time before it all changed.
    Before the divorce, Christmases and birthdays brought the Big Wheels and Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots that we boys coveted; after the divorce, you knew not even to ask for those kinds of presents. Before, our neighbors were mostly intact families, people with decent jobs, adults who believed in the American dream (at least the black version) and had children with similar aspirations. Our neighborhood was relatively safe. We had the occasional break-ins and robberies but no gunfire. Its values were those of the mainstream, that broad swath of mainly white middle-class America that social scientists and politicians use as a measuring stick and try to evoke as a cultural touchstone.
    True, one of my uncles had been shot to death while sitting on the toilet in the bathroom of a club, an innocent bystander who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that was unusual and it happened far away from our home. That kind of violence didn’t haunt our neighborhood. While we didn’t live in the Miami of postcard-perfect beaches and Art Deco hotels, our block was clean and tidy. It was occupied by hardworking strivers, the type who sought above all to be respectable.
    Afterward, however, although my mom kept us out of the actual projects until 1980 when I was in high school, we moved about once a year and often lived in neighborhoods that were dominated by entrenched poverty and the knot of problems associated with it.
    Of course, before, there were also those fights and the fear and the running to the neighbors to call the police. Before, the chaos for us was mainly in our home; after, it was everywhere. And no one bothered to explain it all to us. There was no sitting the children down and telling us, “Mommy and Daddy still love you but we can’t live together.” My parents weren’t much on explanations in general. They lived in a world where you learned by example, not by explanation. You were told what to do, not why, and that was it. You figured it out or you looked like a fool. There wasn’t time for childish questions or wondering.
    Consequently, when I learned later about research comparing the spare verbal landscape of American childhood poverty to the richer linguistic precincts of the middle class, it really resonated with me. The classic study by Todd Risley and Betty Hart compared the number of words heard by children of professional, working-class, and welfare families, focusing specifically on the way parents talked to their kids.
    It was painstaking research: the researchers followed babies in forty-two families from age seven months to three years. The families were drawn from three socioeconomic classes: middle-class professionals, working-class people, and people on welfare. The researchers spent at least thirty-six hours with each family, recording their speech and observing parent-children interactions. They counted the number of words spoken to the child and described the content of the conversations.
    The researchers found that families headed by professionals—whether black or white—spent more time encouraging their children, explaining the world to them, and listening to and responding specifically to their questions. For every discouraging word or “No!” there were about five words of praise or encouragement. Verbal interactions were mainly