The Young Apprentice

When does a boy become a black boy?

Mark Yarboro couldn't have been more than 10, on a driving trip with his grandparents and sisters from his home town of Fayetteville, N.C., to St. Louis, when they stopped for gas, pulling up next to two white men. One of the men pointed to Mark's sisters in the back seat and said, "Look at those monkeys."

Mark heard the remark with a child's ears.

"Those aren't monkeys," he told the men. "Those are little girls."

This, he would realize years later, was the first stirring in his racial awakening.

The son of a teacher and a nurse's aide, Mark lived a segregated early life in his all-black neighborhood and schools. Whites were mostly an abstraction, people he saw on television. That changed in sixth grade, when he was bused to what had been an all-white school in Fayetteville.

As volatile as the 1960s were, when Mark was growing up, his parents spoke little of race. They simply encouraged him and his sisters to study hard and set high goals. It wasn't until 10th grade, while taking a black history course, that the legacy of slavery and discrimination became real to him.

"My parents kept a lot of things from us," he said.

Looking back now, through a father's eyes, he understands better the struggle of every parent: how to preserve a son's innocence as long as possible while preparing him for the difficulties life will bring.

How close do you hold a son? How far do you push him? He is constantly reassessing just what of his own baggage to impart to Marcus, who turns 9 on Sunday and is growing up in such different times.

Mark knows that Marcus will be able to see his father's successes, but what of the heartaches and failures, the moments that can haunt a man?

After graduating from North Carolina Central University, Mark received an Air Force commission and headed to Panama City to train as an air weapons controller.