When Mike was a little boy, his mother was a legal secretary in Memphis. While she was working, a feisty and caring woman named Laura kept Mike and his brother--along with her own sons, Jessie James and James Jessie. "She was so strong she could pin any one of us to the floor if she had to," Mike said.
One day, James and Mike (nicknamed Pancho) and James' big brother, Jessie, did what they always did on summer days--walked through the ditches collecting bottles. Then they walked to one of the two little stores in the neighborhood to buy strawberry and peach Nehi drinks with their bottle money. If they had enough pennies, they'd also buy peanut butter logs. On the most profitable bottle days, they bought a Snickers and divided it three ways.
People weren't allowed to hang out at Bishops' Store, but at Peake and Belle's, townspeople sat around outside talking. Pancho and James were sharing a Nehi and Jessie was inside when a bully came up and tried to wrest their bottle from them. (Mike can't remember whether the bully was white or black because he hadn't yet noticed the difference in skin color.)
Suddenly, big Jessie came out yelling. "You leave Pancho alone!" he said. "He's my nigger!"
Five-year-old Mike was impressed. "I'm your nigger?" he asked, proud of his new moniker. "Can I tell people?"
When school started, he didn't understand why they went to different schools.
During the fifteen years that Laura "raised" the boys, Mike noticed that Jessie's and James' books were the ragged leftover books from the white school. As Laura followed along with the boys' homework, she taught herself to read.
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