if that's your boyfriend

he wasn't last night

square one.

Rest in peace, Louise Meriwether. The author died on Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 100.

Can’t recall who handed me this 1970 novel, but I think it was a librarian at my middle school. I was mesmerized by the precision and detail of Daddy Was a Number Runner, and until I read the book (beautifully assessed here, by Lovia Gyarkye), I didn’t know what a “number runner” was.

…Daddy, Ms. Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Ms. Angelou’s first memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), were among a handful of books of that era that “took the perspective of Black girls seriously, attending to their simultaneously brutal and tender realities.”

Meriwether made this California girl see Harlem. Scenes from this book — a particularly devastating one occurs in a movie theater — have stayed with me all these years because Meriwether writes so relentlessly from the point of view of 12-year-old Francie: tween logic, alternately flat and roller-coaster emotions, vanishing innocence, ph…