Summary

“Alcatraz” (83) is narrated in the first person by a woman named Cecilia who came to live in Oakland at 24 when she moved there to work in a theater and dance program for abused children. Cecilia explains that her great-grandfather, Charlie Sullivan, had been imprisoned at Alcatraz when he was 18. Previously, he had been in the army for three years, having joined using a false birth certificate. After two years, the army admitted that the charges of murder against him had been a mistake, and he was freed. He eventually married a woman in New York and had two children with her. The younger child left home months after the birth of her own child, “a brown girl in a white family” (85). The “brown girl,” Cecilia’s mother, was close to her grandfather. The narration recalls a time she experienced racism from a neighbor and...