Over on Court Street in St. Joseph, Mich., one mile from the little bridge to Benton Harbor, my hardworking family struggled to make do. We poured milk over broken Saltines and called it cereal. I tried, in a thousand obnoxious ways, to persuade my parents to buy food they couldn’t afford, not least in a choreographed song-and-dance routine with my siblings titled “The There’s-No-Food Blues.”

We had one big advantage: terrific public schools.

For all the separateness between St. Joseph and Benton Harbor — one whiter and richer, the other poorer and mostly African American, with the St. Joseph River curving between them, doomed to be a perpetual metaphor — these are small communities. For many of us, our roots span both sides.

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