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Inside the Berry household, things were even more troublesome. Years later, Halle would recall how Jerome Berry’s social drinking evolved into a swift and steady descent into alcoholism and substance abuse, with marijuana being his main drug of choice. Even more hor- rifying was the physical and mental abuse he directed toward Halle’s mother and sister. Jerome and Judith’s fights became more and more frequent, and when those arguments became physical, it was a young Heidi who tried to break them up. Halle told a reporter how Heidi would try to stand in between her parents to keep her father from hitting her mother, and she often found herself caught in the middle and became another outlet for Jerome’s growing, unrelenting anger. Halle’s memories of those turbulent times include an incident when her father threw the family puppy against a wall, but she never endured his rage and remembers feeling tremendous guilt that she was spared from her father’s abuse while her mother and sister were not.7,8 When Halle was four years old, Jerome Berry abandoned his wife and daughters and moved out of their home, never once offering to provide monetary support or coming to visit his children during the several years that followed. Heartbroken but not defeated, Judith was relieved that she and her daughters were out of harm’s way. Seeing his departure as an opportunity to regroup, Judith decided to give her girls a chance to lead more successful lives and put them on a path that would allow them to make their dreams come true. After driving past the high school where her daughters would eventually enroll and finding it run down and covered in graffiti,9 Judith realized that their gritty neighborhood lacked the strong educational system that would give her girls a chance to excel and grow up to become confident, independent women. The young mother quickly packed up all of their worldly possessions and swiftly relocated 18 miles southeast of Cleveland to the predominately White suburb of Oakwood Village. ESCAPE TO THE SUBURBS The sleepy, tree-lined enclave of Oakwood Village, Ohio, made much of its diversified population and family-friendly vibe on its Web site in 2009 (‘‘Welcome to Our Proud and Progressive Community,’’ the home page proclaimed), but in 1970, when Judith moved there GROWING UP DIFFERENT 5