Summary

Chapter 11 is titled “Boys Will Be Boys …” [sic]. Johnson begins this chapter a series of short considerations, each one beginning with the sentence “I contemplated whether I would write about you now that you are dead” (198). In each one, he describes how, in talking with various members of his family, he learned that it was important to tell everything that was part of his story, and made his decision to move ahead and tell this truth.

Then, continuing to address the person who was one of his male cousins, Johnson describes how the cousin came to visit one night, commenting that he was older, estranged from his father, and was “attractive by most standards” (200). That night, Johnson says, he was thirteen years old, and the cousin was older by about four or five years. They ended up sleeping together on the bottom...