This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

We grew up in a two-story house in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

The house had a balcony, and in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The house had a balcony,

and in the summer,

we were able to sleep out on the balcony in the cooling air.

Hilton Alls is a longtime staff writer for the New Yorker

and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote about his childhood in his most staff writer for the New Yorker and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

He wrote about his childhood in his most recent piece for the New Yorker, an essay called Homecoming.

The Brownsville summer of 1967 was like every other Brooklyn summer I'd experienced, stultifying.

Relief was sought at the nearby Betsyhead pool and at the fire hydrants that reckless boys opened with giant wrenches. The cold water made the black

asphalt blacker in the black nights. Gossip floated down the street from our neighbors' small front porches

and from stooped by big concrete planters full of dusty plastic flowers. Nursing or beer or

Pepsi, the grown-ups discussed far-off places like Vietnam. So-and-so's son had come back from there all messed up,

and now he was on the methadone. Then the conversation would shift to the kids. Every kid in our

neighborhood was everyone else's kid.

Prying, caring eyes were everywhere.

Sometimes the conversation stopped, but just for a moment, as girls in summer dresses passed.

Men and women alike looked longingly at those girls for different reasons, they ambled down the street, pretending to pay no mind to the fine-built boys who called to them from a distance.

Hilton, you grew up in Brooklyn with your sisters and brother and your mother who had

immigrated from Barbados. Can you tell me about that environment? And your mother, she was

politically active, right? Yes. Even though I don't think that she would ever say that she

...