Chris: Listen, when y'all get to the house, don't ring the bell or knock on the door. Just wait, okay?
Drew: Whatever.
Tonya: What if I have to go to the bathroom?
Chris: Go at school.
Tonya: That bathroom is so nasty.
Chris: Listen. You wake up Daddy, he's gonna punch me square in the face, and if he does that, I'm gonna punch you in the face, and then he's gonna kill me and wind up in jail. Now do you want daddy to go to jail?
Tonya: No.
Chris: No? All right then.

Adult Chris: [v.o.] My mother thought going to a White school meant I would get a better education and I would be safer. Wrong! That's Joey Caruso. A little thug with a big chip on his shoulder. You know I manage to avoid him before I wore these shoes.
Joey Caruso: Nice shoes, Bojangles.
Chris: Bojangles? That's not what your mother called me when I was tap dancing in her drawers last night.
Adult Chris: [v.o.] I know you think I'm crazy. But if I let him get away with that, he'd be doing it all year. Now I couldn't beat him, but I thought maybe I could out-Black him.
Chris: What?
Chris: Did I stutter?
Joey Caruso: You know who I am?
Chris: You step on my shoe again and I'm gonna tell you who I am. I don't play that. I'm from Bed-Stuy, boy. I bring half of Marcy up in here. I will beat your butt so bad, you're gonna need crutches in your sleep.
Adult Chris: [v.o.] Hey, this might work.

[As Caruso shoves Chris, he falls to the ground and lands on the feet of the principal, Dr. Raymond]
Dr. Raymond: What's your name?
Chris: Chris.
Dr. Raymond: I'm Dr. Raymond, your new principle. Now get off my feet. [Caruso laughs] That's funny? That's not funny. What's your name, son?
Joey Caruso: Caruso.
Dr. Raymond: Fix yourself up next time you come to my school. See those shoes? They say something. They say I'm a student, I want to learn. I want more of that. And less of this. [to Chris] Don't bump into me again.
Adult Chris: [v.o.] Even though Caruso was messing with me, getting embarrassed made him even madder. So you know what's coming next...
Joey Caruso: This isn't over, nigger!
Adult Chris: [v.o.] Oh, he got away with calling me nigger that day. But later in life, he said it at a DMX concert and almost got stomped to death.

Adult Chris: [v.o.] Keisha was the girl next door. At 13, I didn't know a lot about sex. But I knew she had something to do with it.
Keisha: Hey, Drew!
Adult Chris: [v.o.] Drew?
Drew: What's up, Keisha?
Chris: You know her?
Drew: Yeah.
Adult Chris: [v.o.] Drew was so cool he got girls at 10 that I couldn't get until I was 30.

Rochelle: Haven't I told you "do not eat the big piece of chicken"?
Chris: But I was still hungry.
Adult Chris: [v.o.] My mother wasn't really mad at me, she was looking out for my father.
Rochelle: You see how big he is?
Adult Chris: [v.o.] She didn't want him to go to work hungry. Because if he goes to work hungry then he'll be grouchy. And if he's grouchy, he might call his boss Cracker. And if he calls his boss Cracker then we're livin' in the projects again.
Rochelle: But do not eat the biggest piece of chicken. Do you understand? At least, you didn't mess up these school shoes. Come over here and give me some sugar. Now go to bed.

Adult Chris: [v.o.] We moved to an apartment in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Now, had we known that Bed-Stuy would be the center of a crack epidemic, I guess we'd have picked some place else. Bed-Stuy even had its own motto: "Bed-Stuy, do or die".
Rochelle: Look at that! Look at that!
Adult Chris: [v.o.] Those are some of the guys that are gonna die.

Chris: Mom, why is it that Drew and Tonya get to go to school in our own neighborhood but I have to go all way out to Brooklyn Beach?
Adult Chris: [v.o.] Brooklyn Beach was a poor Italian neighborhood on the other side of town. It was just like Bed-Stuy, take away the gangs, add the mob.
Rochelle: Because the junior high school around here is like a hoodlum factory. And those White kids, they get an education.
Adult Chris: [v.o.] Not a Harvard type education, just a not-sticking-up-a-liquor-store type education.

Adult Chris: [v.o.] I was never cool growing up. The coolest thing about me was this pair of white sneakers I had.
Rochelle: Oh, no, no, no, no. Boy, you're not going to school in no sneakers.
Adult Chris: [v.o.] Believe it or not, there was a time where you couldn't wear sneakers everywhere.
Chris: Why? Everybody else wears sneakers.
Rochelle: Because you look raggedy. Plus, you have an assembly today. Boy, you have lost your mind.
Adult Chris: [v.o.] My mother hated raggedy. She always said it's better to be poor and neat than rich and raggedy. I think she said that because we were poor.
Rochelle: Here. Wear Drew's good shoes.
Chris: I hate these shoes. And everybody will make fun of me at school.
Rochelle: You've only been going there for a week. You don't know everybody.
Adult Chris: [v.o.] I was the only Black kid at the school.
Chris: They know me.

Adult Chris: [v.o.] I had to take two buses to school everyday. Was the junior high school across the street really that bad? [gunshots] [children scream] Like rock 'n roll, school shootings were also invented by Blacks and stolen by the White man. My first bus was the 26. I read the newspaper every single day. I learnt more in the way to school than I learnt at school. My next bus was the 44. I was the only Black person on the bus. And nobody was sitting next to me. [Chris moves over to let a pregnant White woman sit down; she shakes her head and remains standing] I mean nobody. If you think she's mad now, wait 'til her daughter brings home O.J.

Adult Chris: [v.o.] You may not think messing up a pair of $40 shoes is such a big deal, but you have to realize that my father's car only cost $65. I had to get those shoes clean.