Black Capitalists

Chapter 1

A Long Way from Adams Drive

I first learned I was both Black and poor around the same time during my childhood. Although my grandmother raised me in Accra, Ghana, for a few years following my birth in 1993, my first recollection of home was 69 Adams Drive, a tan, two-story row house with a shabby roof made of charcoal-colored shingles and a single white plastic chair placed next to the front door. The lawn looked as if rain hadn’t come to that part of Leesburg, Virginia, for a long time. A mocha-colored fence missing most of its pickets hugged the house and the hard stubbly ground it stood on.

The neighborhood had the same feel as my home—modest and worn yet adequate. The Black neighbors exchanged pleasantries and shared a smoke from time to time, while the few white and Latino residents kept to themselves. Given my mom’s insistence that I come straight home after school, I rarely saw the violence that incited the police sirens that often interrupted my sleep. Sometimes I’d see the aftermath in the form of slashed car tires on my morning walk to the bus stop.

My dad was often found sitting on his front-porch chair drinking a Heineken six-pack with a box of Camel cigarettes nearby, chewing raw ginger while chatting with his high school classmates on the phone, or fast asleep in his cedar recliner that was the eyesore of our cramped living room. He sat there so frequently that the chair’s headrest had a permanent round grease stain from the pomade he used for his balding scalp. I liked to think that his physical presence made up for his emotional absence in my life before my parents’ divorce and his exit from the remainder of my childhood.

Our mornings started at four-thirty when Mom would wake my older brother Dash and me to complete our daily chores: wash the bathtub, scrub and wipe down the toilet and sink on each floor, sweep the laminate kitchen floor, vacuum the stained beige carpet, and dust everything else. Our cleaning was followed by study time. Over a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and whole milk from the Walmart down the street, I’d review my notes on class activities from the prior day and check my homework to ensure my answers were correct. My seven-year-old self often felt as if an entire day had passed by the time I walked out the front door to catch the school bus at seven-thirty.

I’d come home to read to my mom from the free newspapers she collected during her desk security job at one of the prominent telecommunication companies in town, while she snuck in a few extra hours of sleep before her next work shift. I would begrudgingly read aloud the latest on market trends and technological advancements that I didn’t understand and even the obituaries as my mom snored in response. On special days I’d be allowed to watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy right before my strict eight p.m. bedtime. Whenever my mom worried Dash and I didn’t have enough to do, she’d pepper our daily routine with assignments to read planet Earth pamphlets from the local library and write essays about our learnings. My mom would promise trips to Disney World for exceptional work, but I slowly learned that her proclamations were a parenting hack. To this day, my mom doesn’t know where Disney World is. But back then, she knew just speaking the name could influence a child’s behavior.

Despite the hours spent writing what I thought were perfect essays, I usually received a C as Mom encouraged me to work harder. Her strategy to nurture a strong work ethic in me was sometimes sneaky in this way. She knew that rather than feeling deflated by an average grade, I would be inspired to be even more thorough the next time.

Sundays were church days. Leesburg Baptist Church had an active bus ministry that would collect kids living in the downtown area for morning services. I loved going to church because it was an escape from the monotony of my usual routine. My mom allowed it because it gave her the luxury of a few hours of peace and quiet to prepare for her next overnight shift.

A year after I became a church member at eight years old, my parents divorced. My dad chose to stay, so we left. Mom won an affordable housing lottery, and we moved from our two-story row house to a two-bedroom apartment on Newberry Street thirty minutes south of Leesburg. The new five-story apartment building was part of a gated complex surrounded by a thick forest, soon to be demolished to make way for real estate development. Unlike my neighbors at 69 Adams Drive, my new neighbors were mostly white and seemingly well-to-do. One similarity between my old and new neighborhood is that the white people still kept to themselves. But on Newberry Street there were no police sirens, slashed car tires, or insistence from my mom to hurry home after school.

My mom’s newly single status heightened my awareness of our financial circumstances. I now noticed she had two distinct work uniforms instead of one, the chronicle of daily purchases in the back of her checkbook to keep track of how much money we had left, and the mostly bare shelves in our refrigerator. Breakfast was usually just a glass of warm milk in my tall purple cup. There were instances in our old home when the power would go out or the water would stop running, forcing us to bathe with gallon-sized water bottles, but those moments never inspired a sense of worry. The stories other kids from the neighborhood would share during our bus rides to and from school made those moments seem normal. Life on Newberry Street was different because there wasn’t the comfort of shared experience with other children who looked like me.

Despite my stomach’s growls of hunger I would try to mute by pressing my arms over the noise or shifting in my school chair to divert attention, I was an eager and attentive student. By the third grade, my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Anderson, identified me as gifted, and I passed the aptitude tests to prove it. I had a particular love for math because if I knew the rules of numbers, I could always figure out the right answer. Mrs. Anderson would often have us compete in times-tables tests, and the only person who could beat me was a blond, blue-eyed boy named Austin. He was smart too—and a know-it-all. With everyone else eliminated, he and I would go toe-to-toe in the last round. I reveled in the fact that I won more than I lost. Most of the children in my third-grade class at Selden’s Landing Elementary School were white. Within the four walls of that classroom I realized for myself that I was Black—beating everyone, but especially Austin, at timed multiplication tests. It meant something to know that though I was different, I could beat the best of them.

I would often regard my classmates with curiosity about how different they looked from me. My hair, braided and greased with pomade, would stick out around my whole head while Austin’s shiny blond hair hung limp around his pale white face. For hours I would daydream about his home life and assume it was nothing like mine. He’d come to school in clothes the cool kids wore, like crisp polo shirts with the Abercrombie moose logo embroidered on the upper right side. Mine were usually from the Salvation Army or gifted from church members. I wished for the life I imagined he had without ever knowing his life at all. We seemed different in most ways, our race the most visible distinction. But for all my envy of the material things he had, which I attributed to his whiteness, I took pride in knowing that I lacked nothing in intelligence.