Atlanta looks small this morning when I went go out walking. Everything's so new. I smell the creosote in the train smoke and I remember wanting to go places, but I don't want anything now. Except to sit on the platform of the Atlanta train station and watch the folks coming and going, kissing and leaving.
Mama's dead, and I'm feeling old. I'm up next. It's my turn to die. R. wants to move to Charleston. He wants to begin again. His daughter is dead. Every day all day so many events—but these two deaths are the center around which the rest of both our lives revolve. One was inevitable, the other a miracle. If Precious had lived, R. would never have thought of marrying me.
When his father was living, he felt the spit of paternal hypocrisy falling down on his city, on Charleston, like rain. He grew leery of the hypocrisy of the old place, the citizens who loved the oldness of their town but denounced with silence the vigorous sinners who had built it. They were an old family, and R. was descended from the best of the original line of bold sinners. He had not changed but he kept hoping the town would, that it would reach back beyond its proper present and allow him place. Somehow, with his father's death, R. seemed to think all his critics had vanished. All his longing glances were backward. Well, let him go to Charleston and see what he finds.