Milledgeville, situated at the heart of Baldwin County, and once the capital city of Georgia. Black labor built it, the slaves bought and sold in the marketplace by the Presbyterian Church on Capital Square. He supposes the ones who constructed the houses, the skilled artisans, were more fortunate than the poor souls carted off to pick cotton, but everything is relative.
At the eastern border, fast flowing, runs the Oconee River. Sam Tant, Babe’s older half-brother, is killed while swimming in the Oconee River. Babe sometimes speaks of trying to rescue Sam Tant. Sam Tant jumps from a high branch, but misjudges the depth of the water and lands on his head. Babe pulls Sam Tant’s body from the river, but Sam Tant isn’t moving, and later Sam Tant dies. Babe tells the story often, one more burden for him to carry. He guesses that Babe was perhaps sixteen or seventeen when the incident occurred, but has never been able to pin down the year.
Babe’s role in the tragedy adds another stratum to Babe’s mythology, continuing the process of augmentation and concealment in which Babe is engaged, Babe’s grief obvious and therefore not to be interrogated further, a deflector of intrusion. Sometimes he imagines himself peeling away Babe’s integuments, excavating the seams, so that Babe becomes thinner and thinner, smaller and smaller, until at last all that remains is the shining core of the man, the radiance within.
But Babe is immune from such exploration, and when disease finally pares away the layers of Babe, all that is left is death.