Gardner recalls his early memory of staying at the Robinson’s house with his sister, Ophelia, and two other foster children. Their birth parents were elsewhere, but nevertheless, a beautiful woman who made candy once came to visit him and a “clean, warm, good smell that [wrapped] around me like a Superman cape” made an impression on him (15). The woman was actually his mother, who had come to visit him.

Over the years, from the accounts of different relatives, Gardner received a patchy impression of his mother’s life as a kind of “Cinderella story—without the fairy godmother and the part at the end where she marries the prince and they all live happily ever after” (19). Bettye Jean Gardner was raised in Depression-era rural Louisiana, where despite enduring poverty and racism, she was a star student at Rayville Colored High School. She wanted to become an educator, but after her mother died, her father’s new wife made sure that the money that was to send Bettye Jean to college would be spent on her own daughter. When Bettye Jean got pregnant with the child of a married man, she went to North Milwaukee, where her brothers had settled. On her journey, she met another married man,

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