Linden Hills

Xavier Donnell is a successful resident of Linden Hills:

Through a mixture of patience, hard work, and premeditated luck he had managed to move up in a place like General Motors, where it was so easy to get lost among the myriad Ivy League and ivory-skinned credentials of men who were just as sharp and hardworking as he was. (98)

He lives on Third Crescent Drive but is in love with Roxanne Tilson—Lester’s sister—who lives on Fifth Crescent Drive. Roxanne is highly opinionated and doesn’t share Xavier’s vision of how to achieve in life. The first line of the chapter tells us that “Xavier Donnell was falling in love with a black woman,” implying that he would rather fall in love with a white woman (97). Xavier tries to model himself after Maxwell, the only other successful black man at General Motors, and so he invites Maxwell over for a drink to ask for his advice regarding Roxanne. Maxwell is more successful than Xavier precisely because he has worked his whole life “to make his blackness disappear” (102). This is not to say that Maxwell considers himself white; “being white was the furthest thing from his mind, since he spent every waking moment trying to be no color at all” (106).