Saturday, April 9, 1966.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

—Passover Haggadah.

When I was twelve years old, and in my first year of junior high
school, we moved from our predominantly African-American
neighborhood in Philadelphia to Barringer Street, which was
white but only a short distance away. The movers arrived in the
morning and transported our furniture and belongings to our
new house. And so, the departure of our exodus commenced. My
parents had been in the market for an affordable house in a white
neighborhood for the past year but had given up in exasperation
with each other. Marital discord appeared to put the kibosh on
the house hunt. Aunt Zelda, my mother’s older sister, stepped in.
She and my mother went in search of a property—without my
father—and finally came up with a location.

On the afternoon of the ninth my father’s older sister, Rose

visited. Previously, she had loaned five hundred dollars to my
father to cover closing costs, completing the transfer by means of
a cash-filled brown paper bag. The transaction had the obscurely
nefarious look of something out of The Godfather. Later on the
ninth, Aunt Zelda and Uncle F. arrived. They invited us to their
house in the suburbs that evening. Aunt Zelda thought she was
doing my mother a favor. “I know if you stay here,” she said,
“you’ll be up all night unpacking. Come up to our house and you
can relax.” I failed to see how having my mother drive forty
minutes to Aunt Zelda's house after nightfall then driving another
forty minutes home would be “relaxation.”

It was the day before Easter Sunday, and Aunt Zelda and Uncle F.
had arranged a spray of white lilies in a vase on a table in their
living room. Aunt Zelda explained that the flowers were a gift for
church services the following day. She and Uncle F. were devoted
church-goers. Aunt Zelda had severed the flowers' stamens and
placed the dismembered botanic genitals in an adjacent ash tray. I
found the image mildly creepy, though at age twelve I didn’t
appreciate the unintended symbolism: it was as if Uncle F.’s
genitals had been severed by Aunt Zelda’s imperious tyranny and
lay displayed on the table.

My father, commenting on the fact that our family now lived in a

nicer neighborhood, said, “Now, Zelda (my sister) will be able to
date a better class of boy.” My sister had started dating her future
husband, Eddie, about a year earlier, in February 1965. My
father's opinion of Eddie was not optimistic. It seemed that the
only positive thing my father had to say about him was—and my
father said this several times—“at least he's Jewish.”