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young to have a name for the charged erotic atmosphere of my cousin’s innocent sixteen-year-old rapture, but I’m sure that even as a seven-year-old I took more than aesthetic pleasure in Joanne’s thrilling femininity. Especially the night we sat at the kitchen table with her while she painted her fingernails: I had only ever seen my mother perform this ritual, with its alarming but pleasant smell, its fierce concentration, its thorough transformation of utility to beauty. If she was not already, or not quite, my cousin Joanne was becoming, joyously and giddily, a woman.
    We each got a pinky, Bobby first. As she finished painting her thumb, Joanne showed us how to use the lip of the tiny bottle to remove extra paint and how to smoothly apply the bright red polish evenly, starting at the cuticle. I watched Bobby and I thought I could do better. I wanted to be better than Bobby at everything; I think that as his older brother I thought it was my job. Until soon after, when he began falling down, too weak to get up again, and I tried not to be.
    I took a lesson here, I believe, from my father, who played card games and board games with us and only sometimes won. I began to suspect that if my love for my brother meant anything more than sleeping under the same roof (and in different rooms now that he was ill and in a wheelchair), then the exuberance of boyhood and adolescence would have to be tamped down somewhat, just as I would have to sit or kneel to talk to him.
    But of course Joanne wouldn’t set us against each other by playing favorite. I don’t recall which of us had the idea to paint her toes, but she nixed that. I imagine we’d already done a sloppy job on her pinkies.
    My mother called Joanne a tomboy, a word that I couldn’t quite grasp because it seemed like a compound, and even if it meant a girl who was like a boy, I couldn’t figure how the “tom” got in there. Joanne was no stranger to a baseball glove, and liked to play catch with us in the backyard, bringing her own mitt. Still, “like a boy” she wasn’t.
    And then she just stopped coming. If our parents were going out—usually to a neighbor’s house or to my Aunt Kitty and Uncle Forrest’s house for pinochle and beer— Bobby and I would jump up and down and yell, “Joanne! Joanne!” but it was always one of my other cousins, one of Aunt Kitty’s daughters, who came to babysit. It wasn’t that we didn’t enjoy our cousins Annmarie or Maryann, it’s more that we missed Joanne, and no one gave us any reason why she no longer came over to “mind” us or even visit. Our other cousins, Aunt Kitty’s daughters, were sweet enough but would never wrestle or play catch with us.
    I must have found out the way I found out most things, by eavesdropping on adults, probably listening to my parents’ conversation through the floor register at night when we were supposed to be sleeping. My Uncle Francis had “thrown her out of the house.” That’s what I understood as a young boy. That, and the additional information that she “went to live with the coloreds.”
    It isn’t hard to imagine Uncle Francis in a racist rage. I don’t think I saw him more than half a dozen times over the next half century, but each time, somehow, he managed to insert the term “nigger” into the flow of the conversation, no matter what the topic. All through the years of the civil rights struggle, or watching Willie Mays or Hank Aaron or Elston Howard play baseball, or Wilt Chamberlain or Oscar Robertson play basketball, it was always nigger this and nigger that.
    My uncle disowned his daughter, his only child. She was sixteen, maybe seventeen, still in high school where she met a young man who shared her taste in music, who treated her as the beautiful woman she was becoming, and who was black. Something happened then. My uncle saw them walking down the