In 2009, during the media coverage of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, it was widely reported that her family had been the only one in the housing project where she had grown up that had a set of Encyclopaedia Britannicas. These reports made it sound as if Justice Sotomayor’s family had possessed the only set of Encyclopaedia Britannicas in the entire South Bronx, but I can attest that there was at least one other set, in another housing project just two miles away, because it was purchased by my mother on an installment plan from a well-scrubbed white salesman who appeared at our door one Sunday morning. Unescorted white men (like encyclopedias) were an anomaly in the South Bronx in the early 1970s; they were either police officers or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or they worked for the city housing authority. The scarcity of white faces made me even call into question the existence of Santa Claus: I can recall arguing with my brother over the impossibility of a jolly white man in a bright red suit making deliveries in our neighborhood after dark.
So perhaps it was the sheer novelty of the event that caused me to retain vivid memories of the salesman: he wore thick, black-framed glasses, tan dress slacks, and a pale-green short-sleeved dress shirt with a wide brown polyester tie. Cheerful, blond, and slightly pudgy, he embodied a fantasy of Midwestern wholesomeness and decency that would figure in my erotic life for years to come.
From a standpoint of pure household economics, my mother’s decision to purchase a complete set of encyclopedias appears somewhat foolhardy. Separated from my father and supporting two children on her salary as a nurse’s aide at a psychiatric hospital, she could ill afford to buy a set of books that cost the equivalent of almost an entire month’s rent.
(Coincidentally, Justice Sotomayor’s mother purchased her encyclopedias on a nurse’s salary, although the wages she received at the inner-city hospitals where she worked could not have been significantly higher than my mother’s.) But I have little doubt that my mother was motivated by a belief—common among working-class black parents at the time—that the ladder to the middle class was education, and anything that planted our
Published in 2015 by Ridinghouse
46 Lexington Street
London W1F 0LP
United Kingdom ridinghouse.co.uk
Ridinghouse Publisher: Doro Globus
Publishing Manager: Louisa Green
Publishing Assistant: Daniel Griffiths
Distributed in the UK and Europe by Cornerhouse
70 Oxford Street
Manchester M1 5NH
United Kingdom cornerhouse.org
Distributed in the US by RAM Publications + Distribution, Inc.
2525 Michigan Avenue Building A2
Santa Monica, CA, 90404 United States rampub.com
A People on the Cover © Glenn Ligon
Images courtesy Walker Art Center Library, Minneapolis and Collection Glenn Ligon: All bibliographic details refer to the illustrated edition. For the book in this form © Ridinghouse
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A full catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 909932 06 7
Edited by Doro Globus
Copyedited by Sara Marcus
Proofread by Karen Kelly
Designed by Joseph Logan with the assistance of Rachel Hudson
Set in Baskerville and Helvetica Neue
Printed in Italy by Conti Tipocolor
This project was supported by the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program.