… she was going to do such a job on my particular butt that I would have to go down to Macy’s to buy a new behind
The narrator describes the normalcy around corporal punishment in the 40s in the neighborhood. His mother, after a particular incident, threatens the narrator that she would beat him, but her words are more to threaten than to be taken seriously.
Books filled those spaces for me
The narrator was a hyperactive person. He would often play or roam around and couldn’t find enough patience to sit quietly in the class even when the class was in progress. He felt anxious while he wouldn’t be doing anything. This anxiety was controlled when he read books and he didn’t felt the need to fiddle any more.
There were no longer the three of us in the house
The narrator describes the days after the death of Uncle Jim, where his adoptive father would be so depressed that he would usually listen to some church program on radio on Sundays and most of the nights after work and would speak very little. The mother and narrator grew distant from each other. The father would often pray loudly in the nights and would have arguments with his wife. The mourning disrupted their lives to an extent that it did not feel that they were living their lives like before when it was just three of them in the apartment.
You're a man, now.
When the narrator’s parents learn that he had become a writer, his father is not convinced about his career as suitable, given their race in which there were not a lot of academics. Also, the idea of hypermasculinity made it unacceptable for him that a fully-grown man can earn money, or even should earn money, by writing stories.
Do you like being black?
This question from Dr. Holiday surmises the narrator's conflict of belonging to a race which was considered good only for brutish manual work and not for academics. Saying yes to the question would mean that he conformed to these ideas, and say no to these question would mean rejecting his identity. The question marked the conflict the narrator felt at that time of feeling incredibly talented but having no resources to acquire any higher education or a career.
