Dorian Ford preferred to do her homework in the bathtub. Most nights, she cooked dinner and then retreated to the bathroom of her mother’s cluttered house, where she and her two sons had been living for two years. Every time she tried to work anywhere else, her boys begged her to entertain them before bedtime. To carve out space to think, she had to pretend to take a bath.

One evening in mid-November of last year, Ford piled blankets into the tub, climbed in, and booted up her laptop. She stared at the screen, then exhaled deep and long. The Wi-Fi was broken. Only two papers and a trigonometry test separated Ford, then thirty-three, from finishing the English degree she’d started at Grambling State University, fifteen years earlier. Without the Internet, she couldn’t download research papers or check her e-mail to see if her Shakespeare professor had sent feedback on her final essay. Ford suspected her semester was nearing an ignominious end.

Ford got out of the tub. “Where are my keys?” she asked her sons as she trudged through the living room. “I need to go to Aunt Val’s to do my homework.”

Matthew, Ford’s six-year-old, followed his mother outside. Discovering that his basketball had gone flat, he sat down in the front yard and entertained himself by using an old, disconnected cell phone as a calculator. The week before, he had told Ford, “I desire to be a math genius.” His brother, Isaiah, age twelve, wanted to be a rapper or an N.B.A. star. Ford prayed that Isaiah would abandon these fantasies for a career in computers.

A well-fed cat dawdled nearby as Matthew lay in the grass, punching numbers into the phone. The four of them lived on a quiet, dead-end street in a twelve-hundred-square-foot brick house that looked nothing like the boarded-up shotguns in the poorest areas of Shreveport, Louisiana. But the house’s charms concealed its limitations. It was close to three highways but no parks. The area had one of the city’s highest crime rates. The state assigned the neighborhood schools a D ranking. Ford worried that the neighborhood would hold her sons back, so she woke up every weekday at 4 A.M. to put Isaiah on a bus to a middle school one town over. Matthew slept until five-thirty, then travelled to a magnet elementary school, three neighborhoods away. On weekends, she took her sons downtown to feed the homeless and helped them write rap songs about studying. She did it all hoping they’d go to college, although Ford believed—and statistics showed—that her sons would be more likely to graduate if she earned a degree herself.

Ford held her breath as she cranked the engine of her rusted, unreliable Chevy Impala. Most days, she had to use the pointy part of an earring to disconnect and reattach the battery cables before the car started. This time, the car rattled to life on its own. The dashboard noted 237,542 miles.

Matthew stared at his mother as the car warmed up. It was 8 P.M., close to his bedtime, but Ford felt like she owed him some attention. He’d cried earlier that night, because he felt that no one wanted to spend time with him. Ford stuck her head out the window. “Come on,” she said.

The Impala whined and clacked as Ford muscled it into a turn. Her older sister, Val, lived fifteen minutes away, in a quiet subdivision where every home had a big front yard. Val had moved into the four-bedroom house only days before, so Ford found a space on the floor between boxes. Matthew rolled around the room on an exercise ball, pretending he was in an ocean surrounded by predators.

Given all Val had accomplished without a degree, Ford had expected that her own life would be better. She’d started college imagining she’d also be someone with a nice home and a devoted husband. Instead, Ford lived with her mother and slept in the hangout room her family called “community grounds,” while her boys shared a bunk bed one wall over. Ford cobbled together money from two part-time jobs and various side hustles, but the paychecks weren’t enough to cover her own place. An English degree, Ford hoped, would change her circumstances.

Ford opened the computer and studied her professor’s feedback. She had spent weeks trying to understand “Othello.” She’d read the play twice and listened to it on audiobook as she drove the hour to and from Grambling. But little that she heard from her professor made sense to her.

Ford’s paper was about the play’s depictions of racism. She’d argued that the Elizabethan-era protagonists were racists who believed God condoned their hatred, but her professor said she hadn’t proved her central thesis. “This is way too much baseless conjecture,” he wrote. “Don’t impugn motives you can’t prove.”

Ford estimated that she had a sixty-per-cent chance of failing the class. If she did fail, she wouldn’t graduate. The ceremony was a month away, but she hadn’t sent out invitations or taken any of the commemorative photos other students were modelling for in the middle of campus.

Matthew rolled toward her on the exercise ball. “I’m trying to get to land,” he said. “Can I make it past the sharks?”

After 10 P.M., Matthew slid off the exercise ball and lay his head on Ford’s chest. She closed her eyes and kissed his forehead.

Ford switched to working on her paper about “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the nineteenth-century short story. The main character is a depressed, defiant woman whose husband tries to confine her; she believes she sees a woman trapped in the wallpaper. Ford read the story to herself: “And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so.”

Shreveport is one of the blackest cities in Louisiana, the country’s second blackest state. Black people in Louisiana are less likely to complete a college degree than almost anywhere else in the country. Fewer than ten per cent of the black people in Ford’s Zip Code have a bachelor’s degree.

Today, the mayor, police chief, and local district attorney in Shreveport are all black, but white people long held the power. Caddo, the city’s surrounding parish, was the last place in America to lower the Confederate flag when the South lost the Civil War, in 1865. Between Reconstruction and the nineteen-fifties, according to the Equal Justice Initiative’s “Lynching in America” report, more black people were lynched here than in all but two U.S. counties.

In the white parts of town, oak trees tower over brick houses, manicured lawns, and smooth sidewalks. In Hollywood, the black community where Ford spent her early years, trees grow in dirt yards; back then, her mom’s clapboard home sat across cracked asphalt from what Ford considered the real “hood.” She knew to yell “drive-by” and run inside when someone drove slowly through the neighborhood.

Until she was sixteen, Ford didn’t know her father, a postmaster who lived in Seattle. As a kid, she watched reruns of “Sanford and Son” and imagined her father was Lamont, the show’s peacemaker. But, although Ford longed for a dad, her mother seemed to love her with the force of several parents. One Christmas, Janet bought each of her three daughters a twelve-pack of socks, then wrapped each pair individually so that gifts would fill out the space underneath their tree. Most weekends, Janet and her daughters volunteered to help the homeless and took the bus to the library and to visit Charlie-Bob, the one-eyed alligator at the Louisiana State Exhibit Museum. Often, Janet would take them to see a plaque and a photograph that showed Ford’s great-great-great grandmother, who had helped found Shreveport’s first black church. “You are connected to greatness,” Janet told the girls.