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My earliest memories from childhood have in common a single, overwhelming quality: fear.

I was not yet four when I awoke in the middle of the night to a wild pummeling at the door. Mother, in her bathrobe, unfastened the chain to let in a hysterical woman, then slammed and locked the door just in time. The woman's drunken husband was chasing her with a jagged, broken bottle.

For the next half-hour I lay in bed and listened to the sounds: inside, the woman's blubbery sobs; outside, the man's loud threats punctuated by the blows of his fist on our door and the shatter of glass from a bottle hurled against our brick wall. Then policemen came, and the light from their squad car swept across our apartment, eerily lighting in red the faces of neighbors who had gathered just outside.

Another memory: my mother's stern, mysterious warnings against a "nasty, nasty man" who had been seen in the neighborhood offering candy to little boys and girls. "Don't you ever go near him, she said, gripping my arm as if I already had. "Don't ever go beyond the swing set in the backyard."

The polio epidemic of 1950 had widowed my mother at the age of 26, and only now, as an adult looking back, can I sense the hardship she bore trying to rear two sons in a grim "white trash" housing project near Atlanta.

When I was five, we left that project for the country town of Ellenwood, a move that crossed a psychic distance from Charles Dickens to Mark Twain. We now lived on a divided dirt road, with a colonnade of trees running down its center, in a house that was connected to no one else's. My memories of that year come back in happy waves. The freight train that derailed, spilling mountains of bright green watermelons for us kids to climb, slide bumpily down, then lob at each other. The mule next door who gratefully ate all the too-large and too-bitter cucumbers from our garden. My mongrel dog, Buster Brown, who disgraced himself by wandering too close to an open septic tank. (No amount of raw meat would lure him up a slanted board, and we despaired of Buster's fate until a neighbor man, genuinely heroic, waded in to rescue him.)

In that house I first learned to ride a bike, and to read, and catch a baseball, and climb a tree, and swing out over a creek on a rope. And it was there one Easter Sunday that I learned the meaning of one of the most terrible words in the English language.

As far back as I can remember, we had a dog. They were all mixed breeds from the dog pound, and since we couldn't afford distemper shots they rarely lived long. But as soon as one died, another puppy would come along to chase away our grief. They marked my progression through childhood: "Oh, that's the year we had Rebel, just after Blackie died."

We never had cats, though, not until we moved to Ellenwood. An aunt in Philadelphia had let cats, scores of them, run wild in her row house, and there my mother had acquired a deep aversion. But finally, our first year in Ellenwood, Mother relented. We got a six-week-old kitten, solid black except for white "boots" on each of her legs—as if she had daintily stepped in a shallow dish of paint. Could she have any name but Boots?

Never was so much loving attention devoted to a kitten. My brother and I resolved to raise a pet so unblemished that our mother would desire a houseful of such sublime creatures. Boots lived in a cardboard box on the screened porch and slept on a pillow stuffed with cedar shavings. Forbidden to bring her inside the house, we spent most waking hours on that porch. Mother insisted that Boots must learn to defend herself before venturing into the huge outdoors, fixing a firm date of Easter Sunday for the kitten's first foray.

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April (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44