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."

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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.

He aced the academic portion but failed the simulator tests and washed out. What hurt more, however, was the way he was treated by a senior officer, a black man.

Sitting outside his open office door, nervously thinking about how to save his months-old military career, Mark heard the man joke to his white secretary: "I don't know what these guys are coming to see me for. They ain't got a chance in hell to stay in the service."

"I'll never forget it," Mark said, shaking his head. "I was crushed. I don't care if you're black, white, red or yellow, we have an obligation to help others or try to show them the way."

He spent six months at home with his parents regaining his confidence before heading to graduate school and spending two decades in various Department of Defense jobs, rising to near the top of the civilian rankings.

He wants Marcus to go further.

The two share a middle name: Jerome. He wasn't interested in a Mark Jr. He wanted his son to have his own identity. Kim understood.

Still, Marcus, for him, is a chance for redemption.

For Mark's grandfather, who abandoned his father and seven siblings. And for his own father, a good provider who cooked breakfast for the family nearly every day but who -- as a teacher, principal and school board member -- gave so much of himself to others that there seemed not much left for those at home who loved him.

Mark hungers for his son to remember the ballgames, the haircuts, the large and small moments spent with the old man.

"I felt if I had a son, I wanted to have a closer connection," Mark said. "I'm trying to do the things I felt like I didn't get."

* * *

At School, Finding a Niche

The students in Laurie Karr's second- and third-grade class at the Merit School of Stafford had spent part of their day sprawled across the floor, answering their teacher's questions about the origin of Mother's Day and discussing current events.

Now they were on to a word puzzle -- to unscramble "Battle Hymn of the Republic." No matter how hard Marcus tried, no matter how many letter combinations he made, he was stumped. "I don't get it," he said, then tried some more, his face twisted in frustration.

"I give up," he said finally, bursting into tears. Karr tried to calm him, let him know that the puzzle wasn't worth crying over.

This is one of the luxuries the Yarboros have given their son: a private school education, with small classes and a teacher who, they say, gets Marcus.

Mark, who dismissed private schools as "nicey-nice," would rather his son attend public school. But he finally yielded to his wife's position after Marcus spent two years at Winding Creek Elementary in Stafford, where he got decent grades but stayed in trouble for talking and not paying attention.

His antics in kindergarten became legend at Jerrilynn Hoffman's dinner table. She's Logan's mom.

"Every day, Logan would come home and say, 'Marcus was on red today' or 'Marcus was on yellow,' " she remembered. Green was a sign of good behavior. Yellow and red represented rising levels of misconduct.

It's a problem for boys in general. They talk too much, won't sit still, and account for the majority of school discipline problems. Nationally, black boys make up 8.6 percent of public school enrollment but 22 percent of students expelled. These problems, whether real or perceived, disproportionately land black boys in special education, according to scholars who study the issue.

Kim said her son's public school teachers were overworked and unable to channel his energy.

She found the Merit School, which has 59 children in kindergarten through fifth grade.

Marcus, the only black boy in his class, likes the school because his teacher "is nice to me."

On the playground, he runs and roughhouses like the rest of the boys. During story time, he's on the floor, legs folded underneath him, adding sound effects to Karr's stories.

Karr, who has three sons and 25 years of teaching experience in public and private schools, including in New York City, has seen boys start to slip away, and act out, often because they don't have supportive family structures.

Marcus arrived, she said, with his own problems.

"He was quiet," she said. "He had a very poor self-concept. He cried a lot. He never felt comfortable to get up and say anything in front of the class."

Those reports surprised Kim. Her son has always been outspoken and inquisitive.

Karr, she said, has been good for Marcus. In her class, Marcus is free to roam, to lie on the floor to read and, sometimes, to request alternative assignments. If he wants to go last for a presentation, that's okay, too, Karr said, as long as he learns.

She was alarmed at news of his parents' separation.

Eight of the 10 children in her class have parents who are separated or divorced. Grades have slipped considerably for some students -- but not for Marcus, a fixture on the honor roll. "I was worried that all the work we had done would be lost," she said.

Now she worries that Marcus may get lost in a larger classroom.

Next year, because the Merit School is closing its upper grades, Marcus is headed to St. Francis of Assisi in Triangle, a Catholic school with a good reputation. It's in fourth grade that the push for a more formalized education begins in earnest.

Private schools, Karr said, won't solve all his problems for the rest of his life, but they seem to have worked so far. He is, she said, very lucky.

* * *

CONTINUED : Separated but United

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