I came into the kind of upper-middle-class world that your daddy can afford to give you if he could bring the ball up on the right like nobody's business, back when he was in his prime. His best years out on the floor in the NBA were over before the big money really started raining down, but the front office always treated him well, before and after he retired. My father's had a good life. And my mom didn't do too bad either."

The interviewer identified her parents: Reginald Carpenter, point guard for the Fort Wayne Pistons in the late '40s and early '50s, and Evelyn Field, the Northern Thrush, a regular headliner at the Drake, Palmer House, and Ambassador West grills well into the mid-to-late '60s, 'her signature song a slow, torchy arrangement of "You Belong to Me" done especially for her by Mel Tome."

"Which in turn made the odds pretty good that if I didn't get sick, or hurt in a car crash or something, I would grow up, and if I did I'd be a light-skinned black woman, and in fact that's what I did.

"Because my father and my mother were comparatively well-off, in the course of growing up I got a good education, private schools, music lessons and so forth. Which meant that when I met my future first husband, we were both in college. Headed, we expected, for professional careers. When I graduated from Brown back in Nineteen-sixty-five Ray was two years ahead of me; Providence, Sixty-three if you had that respectable kind of life in mind you did things by the book. And that was especially true if your skin didn't happen to be white. If you knew what was good for you, anyway and Ray and I both did. Fourteen years later when we parted company, I'd built my whole legal career and reputation as Barrie Foote, not Carpenter, so when we got divorced I was willing enough to let Raymond loose but not to let go my share of his name. I kept the education that my parents gave to me, and I kept Ray's last name as well, 'cause that's how and what I became what I am now.