A young Black-American boy and his equally Black-American mother are walking down the street on a chilly morning before the great thaw of Spring. The mother is dropping him off at school. They don’t have a car, so they have to walk several blocks. He has lackluster grades. He’s only seven years old, and his young female teacher has him learning on his own in some kind of open-learning model of education. His mother wonders if he can do anything at all – like recite the alphabet without singing or read a book that teaches him vowels and consonants and addition and subtraction, all of that first grade stuff, including naptime. The boy just never wants to sleep during the day like his teacher tells him to. He doesn’t like women, but this changes as he gets older. For now, though, women are th
