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we lived in different parts of Harlem.

In your introduction to your book DARK GHETTO, you made some reference to the fact that your mother also moved to keep ahead of what you described, I think, as the “creeping blight.”

She was always very sensitive to this. And very protective of my sister and me. I mean, she was always concerned about our company, you know, who our friends were, and --

This was of either sex?

Oh yes. She always wanted that they were people who could come come to our home, and -- my mother had the behavior, the pattern of the extended family concept of friendship, particularly for her children and herself. You know, we could not have outside friends whom she did not know and approve of. And interestingly enough, she had a way of enforcing this without causing any resentment on our part, which to me is quite a skill. And I guess the church was a sort of a core of our family friends and what not. She was a pretty ardent member of the church.

Which church was this?

This was St. Luke's, Protestant Episcopal Church, at 136th St. and Edgecomb Ave., small church. She was a founding member of that church, because the church that we first went to, when my sister and I were very young, was St. Philip's Church at 133rd St. and Seventh Ave., and they had some conflict on ethnic grounds. Not racial, interestingly enough, but American blacks versus West Indian blacks, and the West