Excerpt from Three Girls from Bronzeville by Dawn Turner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Debra's family and mine have just moved into the privately owned Theodore K. Lawless Gardens apartment complex. Like us, it is still young and unblemished, brimming with promise. The twenty-four-story buildings, three of them in a row, are gleaming concrete monuments to upward mobility and are still pristine. A tall chain-link fence encases the property, forming a barrier along Rhodes Avenue from the Ida B. Wells Homes, a once-idyllic public housing project where my mother grew up. But by the 1970s it's crumbling from misbegotten policies and abandonment, the despair of drugs and gangs. Two decades later, an adjacent housing project will draw national attention after two boys, ages ten and eleven, dangle and then drop five-year-old Eric Morse from a fourteenth-floor window for refusing to steal candy. The country will think it knows everything about our neighborhood and us, but it won't. It can't possibly know.

On this summer afternoon, all of that is far in the distance. As we walk—sometimes skipping, sometimes jogging—I am acutely aware that my sister is gaining on us. I can feel Kim without even turning around. That will never change. But Debra is unaware. She's too busy talking, planning today's adventure, gesturing vigorously. We reach the main street and wait for an opening in the traffic. When the coast is clear, Debra grabs my hand and we run as fast as we can across four lanes to the other side.

"No, Don. No!" my sister yells.

Mom says Kim sometimes speaks out of spite. Calls me "Don" instead of "Dawn," says "Duperman" instead of "Superman." She's little and scrappy, scuffed about the knees like a footstool and unafraid of most things—except speeding cars. Ever since she almost got hit by one. "Don't leave me!"

I pretend not to hear her. I pretend not to know that she will cross if I go back and hold her hand. I'm tired of being the big sister. I'm tired of her always sidling so close to me. I'm tired of sharing.

"Let her come, please," Debra says, clasping her hands. I'm not surprised by her insistence. Like Kim, Debra is the younger of two siblings, two sisters. Though Debra and I are best friends, she and Kim are the true soul mates. Both hear but don't hear. Both see the world through their wants. Mom says, "Kind takes to kind."

"No," I say. And now I'm the one walking ahead. "Maybe tomorrow."

Reluctantly, Debra gives in. We leave Kim behind and continue to walk about a block. I'm thinking, We have the whole summer. We have a lifetime.

Debra and I are unencumbered when we pass the sign that reads, "Welcome to Lake Meadows." It's a high-rise apartment development neighboring ours, designed for Chicago's Black elite. We play tennis and ice skate in Lake Meadows. There's no fence, but clearly a divide. Even the air feels lighter as we make our way to a small utility building that's built into a hill. We hike the short but steep incline to the roof, about twelve feet above an asphalt driveway, and walk out onto the ledge of the "love spot." We settle amid pigeon droppings as, beneath us, the building's gigantic boilers hum and breathe. We sit astride our world.

Weekend after weekend, summer after summer, we return to this place, later riding our ten-speeds. Kim joins us when she's lost her fear of speeding cars. Conversations graduate from Debra's growing brood of toy dinosaurs to training bras and tampons. We talk about how we plan to be doctors and live next door to each other in houses like the white folks have on the black-and-white television shows.

Although we are easily seen by passersby, we feel invisible to everyone but ourselves.

Every once in a while a security guard demands that we come down, and I get ready to run. But Debra doesn't budge. Neither does Kim when she's with us.

Debra yells, "You can't tell us what to do!"

Kim follows with, "Try to make us!"

I remain quiet, chock-full of enough anxiety for the three of us.

Excerpted from Three Girls from Bronzeville by Jack Turner. Copyright © 2021 by Jack Turner. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.