eaten because he was a zebra (that is what the black kids called him). At the time, I was four years old and Michael was seven. Although my mother did not allow me to leave our block, we sneaked out anyway. He showed me the ropes, the ins and outs of ghetto life. He showed me how things worked in the hood--the dangerous people to stay away from, like drug dealers, how to get around safely from one neighborhood to another, and the neighborhoods to stay away from. We also played house, dolls, hide and go seek-all the childhood games-while at the same time managing to learn and adapt to this no-nonsense environment.A boy my age lived in the apartment across from us. His mother was a whore and a crack head that rarely ever watched her kid. One day my mother finally said something to her about it. She went into her house and ran out with a hammer. She attacked my mother as I watched in horror, screaming for help. Finally, my dad came out and pulled the woman off my mother. My mother was bleeding from a gash in her head. She had to have a couple of stitches.When I was five years old, my grandmother was very sick with Alzheimer's disease. My family and I moved to LB so that my mother could care for my grandmother. We brought Michael with us so he could have a better quality of life. We moved to an upper class neighborhood in the presidential estates on Washington Avenue. I attended Elementary and there was, to my knowledge, only one black child in the entire school. It was a big change for me because at the school I attended in San Francisco, I was one of the few white kids. I had never seen so many white people in my entire life until I moved here.was so different from San Francisco. The major difference was lack of cultural diversity. For that reason, I think I had a little of what they call culture shockOne might have enjoyed the change, but not I. I was somewhat scared--it was all so different. Everything I had learned...
