This is a childhood memoir by a poet, essayist, teacher, and journalist. Her immigrant parents struggled to provide her with the educational and social opportunities not available to them or, for that matter, to most blacks of her generation. June Jordan portrays the Harlem and Brooklyn neighbourhoods where she lived and the larger landscape of her imagination. Exploring the nature of memory, writing, and familial as well as social responsibility, Jordan re-creates the world in which her identity as a social and artistic revolutionary was forged.