Authors: Ellen Hopkins
about it, I am grateful to my grandparents
for their vision.
Grateful to my mom for her smarts,
to my father for his bald ambition,
and, yes, greed.
Not to mention unreal intuition.
My Grandfather
Andre Marcus Kane Sr. embraced
the color of his skin,
refused to let it straitjacket
him. He grew up in the urban
California nightmare
called Oakland, with its rutted
asphalt and crumbling cement
and frozen dreams,
all within sight of hillside mansions.
I’d look up at those houses,
he told
me more than once,
and think to myself, no reason why
that can’t be me, living up there.
No reason at all,
except getting sucked down into
the swamp.
Meaning welfare or the drug
trade or even the cliché
idea that sports were the only way out.