Author's Note

The people in this book are real in every way that matters and fictional in every way that would harm them if they were not. The auction blocks, the redlining maps, the wage gaps, the delivery rooms, the prison visiting hours, and the policies that shaped all of it are documented in the historical record and revisited in the *Notes on Sources* at the back of this book. But the men and women who move through these pages, the grandmother in Cleveland, the woman at the Baltimore window, the father in the October kitchen, the couple at the coffee cups gone cold, the boy who counted his change twice in a corner store, are composites. They are drawn from decades of conversations at kitchen tables and cookouts, on porches and in barbershops, in church basements and hospital hallways, with family and friends and strangers who trusted me with pieces of their lives.

I have changed names, ages, cities, and identifying details throughout. Where a story rang so true across so many tellings that it began to feel like a single person, I let it become one. Where one person's account was too specific to disguise safely, I set it down entirely and did not use it. Nothing in these pages is a diary. Everything in these pages is a record.

To the people whose stories informed these composites, some of whom will recognize a phrase or a gesture that came from them, and most of whom will not: thank you. You trusted me with the specific rooms of your lives, and I have tried to honor that trust by treating those rooms as sacred rather than as material. If any of you find yourselves in these pages and feel seen, that is the whole of what I hoped for. If any of you find yourselves in these pages and feel exposed, the fault is mine alone, and I ask your forgiveness in advance.

To my nephews, Jalen, Jacobi, and Jaweun, who are named plainly and lovingly throughout: everything else in the book was written for strangers who might need it. You were written for on purpose.

*Ramon Lyles*