I was always scheming to get an extra cinnamon roll or some clothes I just had to have, a few cents here, a buck or two there. All I knew was that I wanted to be just like Grandpa Marvin, who operated a bail bond business and a real estate company out of his houses, ran a floating craps game, and went down to the golf course to sell barbecue to white folks. Like him I wanted to have clothes and money and to eat what I wanted.

I stole in elementary, junior high, and high school. I didn’t stop stealing until I was in college–and found myself lying in a muddy field, cold and miserable, eluding police after shoplifting at Sears, and marveling at how stupid I was.

It was like Lord of the Flies in my family’s house in Richmond, Calif. It was noisy and crowded and we fought over crackers and over space and we peed in each other’s beds. Only my grandmother Nanny’s house was quiet, a place to think and talk about things no one else seemed to understand. Like becoming a lawyer.

I think for anyone who grows up believing he’s poor, the drive to succeed is always touched by economics. But that doesn’t necessarily make it shallow. For me, it has always been about having enough space to figure out who I wanted to be.

People who have never been without don’t understand the claustrophobia of poverty. I’m not sure I understood it until the end of ninth grade, when I sat on my parents’ front porch, waiting for another summer of nothing in that crowded house. That semester, I’d gotten three A’s and three F’s, the first time I’d ever failed anything. The schedule at Kennedy High School allowed you just three failures over four years, and I’d gotten them all my freshman year. I didn’t even bring my report card home and, somehow, in the summer-vacation crush of eight children, my usually diligent parents didn’t ask for it.

But I sat outside at the beginning of that summer knowing that I was letting my chance slip away. One more F and I’d be just another high school dropout, hanging around the neighborhood, hoping to get on with the county or to get into the service.

I can’t say it was an epiphany. Who has epiphanies on lazy summer days in Richmond, Calif.? And it certainly wasn’t prescience. I only knew that I had to get out of there. I wanted to see San Francisco every day, to pick out my own clothes, drive my own car, and be whatever a man could hope to be.