The social and financial stability of his family allowed him a privileged childhood which included extended visits to the family summer home in Hopewell Junction, New York, private schools, and private summer camps. At age five, young Delany was enrolled in prestigious, private, and predominantly white Dalton Elementary School. Twice daily he made the trip from Harlem to Park Avenue in his father's chauffeur-driven black Cadillac. Delany has described the tensions of his school years in various, sometimes conflicting recollections. At times he felt himself to be "living in several worlds with rather tenuous connections between them" but seemingly without any undue stress. At other times he felt his daily journey across town to be a "virtually ballistic trip through a sociopsychological barrier of astonishingly restrained violence." His friends in Harlem were the children of maintenance men, welfare mothers, and taxicab drivers; his friends at Dalton were the children or grandchildren of television executives, New York publishers, political officials, and members of the literary establishment.
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