Cover: The only flag that counted in the life of my father Patrick John Dunleavy was the American flag with its forty eight stars. The flag with the harp is not the British one under which my father may have grown up. Rather it is a flag design used at different times to express Irish nationalism. It was created in the United States by a group of Irish volunteers who joined the Mexican side in the U.S.-Mexican war from 1846 to 1848 as the Los San Patricios or Saint Patrick's Battalion. The motto Erin Go Bragh underneath the harp means "Ireland Forever." The current Irish tricolor flag was flown in the Easter Rising in 1916 and officially adopted in 1919 by the Republic during its War of Independence. Photographed by Niall Mackey, the flags are a framed gift from Nora Geraghty, purchased during a Harris Auction sale in Delgany, County Wicklow, Ireland, in the 1960s. Nora thought it belonged in my home nearby, Carriglea, in Greystones, County Wicklow, Ireland.

Like his brother before him, Stringer was surrendered to foster care, shortly after birth, by his unwed and underemployed mother—a common practice for unmarried women in mid-century America. Less common was that she returned six years later to reclaim her children. Rather than leading to a happy ending, though, this is where Stringer's story begins. The clash of being poor and black in an affluent, largely white New York suburb begins to foment pain and rage which erupts, more often than not, when he is at school. One violent episode results in his expulsion from the sixth grade and his subsequent three-year stint at Hawthorne, the "sleepaway school" of the title. What follows is an intensely personal, American journey: a universal story of childhood where childhood universals are absent. We experience how a child fashions his life out of the materials given to him, however threadbare. This is a "boy-meets-world" story, the chronicle of one child’s struggle simply to be.