Summary

The narrator, Brian Broome, stands at a bus stop in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, watching a young family. The son, Tuan, falls and begins to cry. Brian tries to remember what it feels like to cry and cannot. His father tells Tuan to be a man and Brian wants to check on the boy and make sure he is okay. He eventually stops crying and his father turns away. They all wait for the bus to come.

Brian remembers all of the lessons his father tried to teach him about the world when he was a child. He remembers “how he tried to make me listen, telling me that I needed a thicker skin and how he’d rather kill me himself than see white people do it. I was a clay that he molded, not with fingers but with punches. My father told me...