Goodbye, Baltimore

Ideally, a boy's biggest concerns on his first day of fourth grade would be whether his lunchbox is cool enough and which teachers will assign the most homework. Things were more complex for David Matthews, who in 1977 moved from suburban DC to Baltimore, a rigidly segregated city in which

David, half black and half white, found no natural crowd. Twenty minutes after being dropped off at school, he was besieged by a pack of classmates who demanded that he explain himself. Nonplussed, he said nothing, "inflaming them with a torturous game of racial keep-away."

Thirty years later, Matthews has dispensed with such reticence. In his kinetic and searching memoir Ace of Spades, he confronts the identity questions that bedeviled him in his youth, telling his story with incisive intelligence and often hilarious irreverence. This unusual combination distinguishes Matthews's memoir from others to which it will likely be compared, most notably James McBride's bestseller The Color of Water, which shares its subject matter but not its spirit. McBride, like Matthews, was born to a black father and a white Jewish mother but reared solely by the parent whom he phenotypically resembled least. Both writers describe the contradictions of growing up in a rough-and-tumble city as nerdy types who had a few feckless flirtations with crime but preferred books. Both memoirs are, in part, paeans to the authors' respective single parents. For all their similarities, however, I can't seem to remember the part in The Color of Water when McBride humps a lubricated foam mattress or stuffs his shorts with hairnets before gym class to create the illusion of pubic hair. Nor do I recall any anecdote about becoming enraged at a Jewish classmate for crying during a Holocaust video, or one in which he gets mugged and relishes calling the perpetrators "niggers" in front of his black parent. Probably because McBride didn't go there, as most of us wouldn't.

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