Davis is born in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is raised in a middle-class home in a segregated neighborhood, and systemic racism marks her upbringing. As more Black residents buy homes in the predominantly white area of the neighborhood, racial violence becomes more frequent and is a regular part of her childhood.

As a young child, she spends part of one summer in New York City with the Burnham family, which makes her “more keenly sensitive to the segregation [she] ha[s] to face at home” (71). This picture of “racial harmony” in the North shatters as Davis spends more time in New York: She learns that a couple her mother knows can’t find a place to live because one of them is Black and the other white.

McCarthyism also reaches its apex during Davis’s youth, forcing James Jackson, a friend of the family, into hiding because of his communist beliefs: “I understood only what my eyes saw: evil white men out to get an innocent Black man. And this was happening not in the South, but in New York” (73).

Davis’s awareness of racial and class inequality grows after she enters first grade. She takes coins from the money her father brings home in the evenings to pay for lunch for school friends who otherwise would go hungry.