 African-American. She was born in 1928, and my father was born in 1929, and his people had also come from the South. We didn't live in a ghetto. It was a black neighborhood. It had been a white neighborhood, and then it transitioned to being a black neighborhood, but it was a pretty stable middle-class neighborhood. My mother and father were divorced when I was young, but my mother's sister, my auntie Lois, whom I discuss in the book right from the start,