From a traumatic childhood in Dallas to Yale, Harvard, Wall Street and beyond, the businessman and author exemplifies the American dream – the very myth his new book sets out to dismantle
Casey Gerald knew he was special from a young age. Not in a conceited or entitled way – being poor, black, gay, “a damn near orphan”, and from the wrong side of Dallas meant he would often be told otherwise – but special because his mother insisted he was. “And she was the most magical creature I ever knew,” he says, “like something from the movies.”
Gerald’s mother was, he later recognised, a manic depressive – “with big, crinkly, burnt-blond hair [that] made her look like a high-yellow Whitney Houston”. She left home and disappeared when he was 13. Some time before, Gerald’s football star father, the son of a renowned Texas preacher, became hooked on heroin only to then carousel in and out of prison. And so this gifted, athletic teenager ended up in the care of his grandmother and older sister – until a football scholarship to Yale became his ticket “to live America from the very bottom to the very top”.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2MayPjW
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