Slivers of light through the heat-soaked outhouse shone on the smeared purple clot. Ivoe hissed through clenched teeth at confirmation of the ache drawing her abdomen into fitful spasms. She bundled her skirt in one hand to clean the mess. Usually a morning like this found her in the grove—a quilt pallet under a tree, the sun dappling shadows on the pages of a good book or the newspaper. But the day ahead and its ruckus left no time for the novel that had vexed her all week.

At seventeen, she was well practiced at drawing out a book long after its last page. Conversations with the characters in her head helped her hammer out opinions on why the heroine had chosen the wrong lover, or the hero deserved his victory. None of that was possible with The Clansman, whose pages shone a light on a dark memory lurking in the back of her mind for years. She remembered how heavy the house felt back when Mister James and Junior were found dead—how quiet Papa and Momma had been and especially Timbo, who all of a sudden turned manly, coming and going at odd but regular hours. Miss Stokes had given the agonizing read as a graduation present, so she had pressed on with a troubled mind and particular longing to know Reverend Thomas Dixon Jr.—to shake him till his eyes popped from his head. For writing such degrading drivel, he deserved worse. Dixon’s Negro characters were shiftless and depraved, when anyone could see that her people had been holding up the sky while white folks walked through the world for a very long time.

Her veil had been lifted. Papa and Momma deserved a prize for shrouding the shameful truth of their lives. Borrowed copies of the Colored American and the teacher’s recent gift helped Ivoe to see what had been hidden during childhood. Negro life was the worst. Certainly no cause for celebration. She slammed the outhouse door and frowned at the day ahead.

Juneteenth was the high point of summer in Little Tunis—plenty of jugging and jawing about slavery, freedom, and how far they had come. A bunch of hollering up a creek and whistling down a well, if you asked her. The view from their porch was enough to put doubt in anybody’s heart. Freedom didn’t look any better than this? Up the road in Starkville, now that was another story. The county seat of Burleson County was now home to the largest cotton gin in East Texas. The Enterprise boasted that Starkville had ten times as many cotton gins as Snook, yielding a daily output of two hundred bales, but in the drive for profit Ivoe knew of many colored families left behind or lost to poverty. At a sharecropper’s graveside Reverend Greenwood would say, “Up the road he was a cotton picker but down here in Little Tunis he was a friend.” Adolescence had shown her that a funeral could be a classroom. She learned what a cry meant: family members left behind cried from exhaustion, the increased labor already felt. Sometimes their cries sounded like a wish to trade places with the one in the ground. Scared to death of the future, some wept for tomorrow.

Those who told Earl Stark exactly what they thought of his contracts (impossible rents valued in dollars but figured in cotton like so: one bale of cotton a day, six bales a week, for three rented acres) watched their belongings get tossed into the road, their cabins axed to the ground. Little Tunis homes were fewer, down from forty—when Ivoe was Irabelle’s age—to twenty-two.

Juneteenth my foot, Ivoe thought.

The screen door banged shut.

“Somebody think she on vacation,” Momma said. “Cooking’s almost out the way. Still got three pies to bake so I need for you to bring some coal home from Papa’s shed. Make sure you take your sister with you.”

Ivoe rolled her eyes. Irabelle’s name was never mentioned without nagging duty. She had not minded so much until the Starkville Lyceum granted admission to colored people for two hours on Saturdays, a day most worked, but where on occasion she had seen as many as two brown faces. With no borrowing privileges, Ivoe cherished her time at the lyceum, but it was impossible to get any decent amount of reading done with a seven-year-old.

“Don’t you roll your eyes at me. I told your sister she could go see where Papa works today. Timbo took you when you was about her age. Make sure she know the rules before she go in there, you hear? And hurry on back—he ain’t gonna be there too much longer ’cause I need him to come finish this brisket . . .” Momma’s voice trailed off as she drew up a hand to shield her gaze from the sun. “ . . . I ain’t got enough to do?” she said as Susan Stark’s carriage pulled into the yard.

“Ivoe, that sure is a long face for Juneteenth. Lemon, when do you plan on getting a telephone so I don’t have to come all the way down here?”

“Well now, Miss Susan, I can think of one solution that don’t have me buying something I can’t afford and won’t put you out neither.”

“It’s just that I hate to bother you—and on y’all’s holiday too,” Miss Susan began, holding out a bag. “I brought some of my best things that require mending. Minnie can’t sew worth a lick. Get around to them when you can, no hurry. Of course, I’ll pay you for your time.”

Ivoe shot her mother a hateful glance when she accepted the bag.

Miss Susan drew a hand under her bonnet, dabbed at the corners of her forehead so that when Ivoe brushed past and bumped her arm, the bonnet fell to the floor.

“Momma, I’m gone.”

Ivoe paused to consider their route. The shortest way, by Deadman’s Creek, would take them through the marsh, but at least she wouldn’t have to look at people she had gone to school with, standing shoulder to shoulder with cotton and corn stalks on a day so hot thinking was hard to do. Her time to get away from the Bottoms couldn’t come quick enough. She was tired of seeing people drudge, get sick, and die. (Sometimes, as with Mister James and Junior, they were struck down for no reason.) Tired of yearning for the woman she wanted to become, someone who moved through life with self-designed purpose. Conversations with Miss Stokes had helped her uncover her inner world as a source of solace when the outer world presented contradiction and strife. Their chats had emboldened her imagination and helped her to carve a plan. The obvious means to secure the ticket to her future was education. Miss Stokes believed education served those in pursuit of an original life, one that truly suits, so Wiley College and Prairie View State College—known for teacher training and home economics—would never do. Even a life like that of Miss Stokes, whose energy and ability she admired, was not the life for her. The two-year course at Willetson Collegiate and Normal Institute offered commercial courses in typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, and, of particular interest to Ivoe, printing. If she worked hard enough, one day she might operate a press at a newspaper as far north as Chicago, as far east as Boston.

“Why we come this way?” Irabelle asked no sooner than she spotted something jutting out from the underbrush. Momma was learning her to whipstitch. After she washed the dingy gore and made it sparkly white again, she could make a jam for Dollbaby. She had soaked the green husk of Dollbaby’s face in coffee grounds until she was as dark as Papa, then used honey to glue on corn silk for hair. But no matter how careful she was, by day’s end Dollbaby was baldheaded. The least she could do was make a dress for her, Irabelle thought, slapping the cloth against her skinny leg to remove the dirt.

Suddenly, Ivoe lunged at her.

“Stop messing with things that don’t belong to you,” Ivoe snapped in such a way Irabelle knew better than to challenge it. Instead she took off running because nothing burned up Ivoe more than having to chase her.

Ivoe tossed the hood to the ground and took off after her sister. Hearing a woman’s wail, the two stopped. Soon there were other voices, which they followed beyond the cypress trees to a gang of black-skinned women swinging axes under the glaring sun. Their axes dropped against the chopping block in harmony. Falling wood chips syncopated the voices singing, Let your hammer ring! Let your hammer ring! “You better watch-a my timber!” a voice boomed. Let your hammer ring!

For Irabelle the day was full of excitement: her first visit to Papa’s shed, where he disappeared for too many hours, coming home like a boo-hag or something that terrified little children when they got out of hand. The picnic promised all kinds of sweets. And now, the sawing, piling, chopping women whose voices made her want to dance.

“Sure is some pretty singing. Why you sing like that?” Irabelle asked, though she meant how do you sing like that.

“Got to—make the time go by more faster.”

“Takes you away from here,” someone grumbled, raising her ax to the wood in perfect measure.

“What y’all doing?”

“Minding their business,” Ivoe said.

“Earl Stark building his own private railroad to haul cotton over to Brazos County. We got to scatter this timber so the mens can lay new rail. Without piling, them tracks just gonna sink ’cause this here swampland.”

Soiled cotton would serve Earl Stark right, Ivoe thought, gently pulling her sister away. “Come on, Irabelle. Don’t have no business in a smith’s cabin no way,” she said when they were back on course.

“It ain’t your business nohow.”

“It is my business when Momma takes my time away from me to carry a certain black-eyed squint someplace she don’t belong.”

“I can stand more trouble than anybody your size.”

“Girl, do you remember the rules?” Ivoe said, half exasperated, half tickled. “Last thing Papa need is for you to rub against something and hurt your fool self.”

“Number one, all tools are sharp and will cut. Number two, all work pieces can burn. Number three . . .”

Lemon pulled down the oven door to cool the pound cake.

“That Miss Susan leaving when I come?” May-Belle said.

“Yeah. She had dresses to mend. Talking about Minnie can’t sew worth a lick.”

“Well, she knowed that when she give her your place. They having troubles?”

“Is eggs poultry?”

May-Belle laughed as Lemon wiped her hands on her apron and picked up the letter. Eight days ago when the package arrived from Willetson Collegiate and Normal Institute, Ivoe had skimmed the letter, letting it drift to the ground while she took off like a bolt of lightning out the door for Miss Stokes.

Lemon carried the letter out to the yard, where she sat against her favorite tree and read it over until she knew it by heart. No orders were filled that day; she was too excited by the catalog she now showed to May-Belle, who sat picking greens. “My head ain’t big enough to wrap around all what’s here. No telling what Ivoe fixing to do. Don’t look for her to be no schoolteacher. Too flighty to sit in a room of books like a librarian. Ain’t got the stomach for sickness, or the heart for the way being sick changes a person. Can’t be no nurse. Listen, May-Belle. Listen at this.” Lemon read from the catalog, all bright and singsongy, “‘Students should dress for health and comfort and not for show. Special dresses for special occasions are not necessary. This institution does not wish to encourage expensive dressing.’ But that still leave . . . What this list say? One sheet, pillow slip, dresses—at least four—one skirt, underwear, two nightgowns, an apron, shirtwaist, towels, and handkerchiefs.”

“What we can’t make you’ll get one way or another,” May-Belle said.

A picture she’d seen a thousand times flashed before Lemon: Ivoe in the kitchen reading, sometimes putting the book or newspaper aside to stare out the window. God only knew what the child thought about. Sometimes the tomatoes needed stewing, or Lemon needed to get to the table to cut something up, but she just hated to bother her. Not that Ivoe took up much room, long and skinny like she was. Just seemed like her thinking needed all that space. She didn’t care what it took; Ivoe would show up to Willetson with everything on that list. But damn if she knew how. “Already sent a money order down to Austin so they can hold a spot for her. The scholarship nearabouts covers it all. Ssth. May-Belle, I tell you, if I had known that nearabouts would leave so much to come up with I might’ve told that girl to fix her mind on cleaning houses or something. That bill what come here liked to made me faint. I showed it to Ennis. He give it right back to me. He say, ‘Ivoe can wait awhile—she ain’t got to go just yet.’ Say Ivoe already got more schooling than most folks in Little Tunis. Well now, May-Belle, don’t tune up your face. He right about that.”

“What what other folks got and what Ivoe need got to do with each other? If it ain’t up to you and her papa to see to it that she get what she need, who it up to?”

“I know you right. It’s not like she don’t deserve it. Times I thought I’d forget how the child looked—face always stuck in a book. Folks been good enough to pay up front for orders because they know Ivoe be leaving soon. Running out of room out there just planting for the orders let alone planting for us. Ennis say it ain’t right to make the whole family suffer for Ivoe’s schooling.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I told him we don’t all the time have to agree but on this here he got to stand with me on the side of right. It’d be wrong not to let that girl go. Just don’t seem right, though, Ennis’s money carrying us the short distance it do.”

“Life ain’t nothing but a peck of trouble to a pint a joy,” May-Belle began. “If you can handle your garden and my little plot, seem like you’d have plenty then.”

Lemon sifted sugar into a wooden bowl holding soft butter and vanilla and started to whisk. “I appreciate it. Won’t be no peace around here until that school bill’s paid. Owing peoples ain’t never sat right with me. Can’t rest good when I do. Them devilish taxes got me feeling like some big bear after me. Ennis the same way, excepting when he owe a man he commence to acting ornery. A person can’t do or say nothing right around him. I asked him once why he got to gripe so. He say, ‘A dollar’s no different than a shackle. Owe one, you in the other.’ Well, with your garden and mine too I can feed my family. That fix the future. But what about the present? Ivoe ain’t got but two dresses. One ain’t fit to wear out the yard—poor thing been darned and mended to death. You love your children more than they can ever know. I mean, they can’t never best you in the loving department. But they sure can make you proud.”

“You stop carrying on about how she gonna get everything. Look how far we done come,” May-Belle said, pointing to the letter. “Look how far we done come.”

May-Belle’s memory stretched back fifty-five years when she arrived in the Brazos River Valley with her husband, Bukhari; his second wife, Iraj; and twenty-eight bondswomen and men who survived the hellish passage from the Kebbi River to America aboard the Clotilde. Starkville was nothing but a seed in the spring of 1859 when Alfred Stark was contracted four leagues and a labor of land (17,890 acres), which promised plentiful corn and cotton, in exchange for bringing sixty German and Moravian families from South Carolina and thirty-one Arabized Africans from Alabama.

In Alabama, Stark paid no mind to Bukhari’s true name. He studied the scars—three lines from forehead to chin on each side of the face—looked at the ledger, and called him Booker. Took a lot of calling for Bukhari to step forward. Stark clamped the pliers he would never be seen without on Bukhari’s bottom lip and pulled until his eyes welled. When they arrived in the bottomlands, many more bondspeople lived in small shacks along the river, but they spoke in the same tongue as the white men lashing them. Sunup to sundown confusion—dangerous fear, fights in the cotton fields whenever the Clotilde Muslims ceased work to pray. (Her first learned English words had been “Pick up your sack.”)

Stark hired Booker out to the Snook foundry, where he could fetch more fitting metal than he would picking cotton. Booker was the only town bondsman Stark had. After the drowning of the twenty-eight, after some time had passed, he took white-folk-decent to him: “This ain’t Hausaland and I ain’t none too keen on friending no Muslim. Things be all right if you act right . . . same holds for your women, Iraj and Mehriban . . . Don’t let me hear you talking that talk.” Stark let him keep a dollar or two of his own money and fixed it so Booker’s women worked in the big house and picked cotton only half a day during harvest.

Her name was still Mehriban the first year. Alone with the trees, studying their bark, tasting the leaves, she watched trade ships up from the Gulf unload dry goods in exchange for cotton until Bukhari arrived with the portion of his love meant for her. He gave a different part to Iraj, whose only child she birthed their first December in Little Tunis. The Kebbawa called a girl born at night Leila, but this one was the color of a lemon.

Word carried on the wind in April 1865 that Negroes were free. One of Stark’s bondswomen took the rumor to heart and tried to set fire to the cotton field. They had a way of dealing with the wild ones. They were all marched to the creek that swallowed the twenty-eight in 1860 to watch a white man drown her.

The truth came again on the nineteenth of June—high cotton time. Everybody had to work the fields. Iraj, Mehriban, and four-year-old Lemon were the first to lay down their sacks and watch Pete, who’d brought the freedom word, jumping through the field. Iraj took Lemon’s hand and headed for the blacksmith shop, where she found Booker at the bellows, wiping sweat from his face, the blue black of a ripe plum and just as smooth. Her words fell like drupes from a sugarberry tree. “Ashhadu anna Muhammadan rasul-ul-lah . . . Bukhari. We are all free.” At the same time, the cook untied her apron, laid it on the counter, and vowed to find her mother somewhere in Georgia. Iraj agreed to cook for the Starks so long as Lemon received tutoring with the Starks’ only child, Earl. Bukhari struck a deal with Mr. Stark. He promised his best smithing if Stark allowed him to earn the house he lived in and the little bit of land Iraj made pretty with flowers and vegetables. He wanted the same amount of land and the hut by the river for his second wife, Mehriban. Stark agreed but his trouble was far from over.

Stark was used to getting good labor from a mean word or the shake of a noose and was surely put out by negotiating with freed people, who were beginning to see sharecropping for what it really was. Many left the Bottoms unsure if they would survive the journey to God only knew where. After the Freedmen’s Bureau refused rations for those who refused to work or couldn’t, the strong ones lived off the land for as long as a seed could be found. The elders suffered till death, bewildered that they had lived to see freedom and would die hungry because of it.

Many expected that part of the valley to perish and did their part to help death along. Soldiers stationed to ease the transition took food and anything else they could carry away, including girls and women. Little Tunis made a ruckus till they found Black Pete, the logger, floating in the creek with a pair of chicken feet where his eyes used to be and his thing stuffed in his mouth. At Old Elam Baptist Church they mumbled that the Good Book had lied; the meek surely wouldn’t inherit the earth.

If not the earth, in 1905 it seemed they had inherited some other fortune, May-Belle thought. Today marked forty years of freedom. Lemon was forty-four, Ennis forty-six. Timbo wasn’t in the county jail. Despite her visions, Irabelle was a happy child, beloved by other children, so maybe she didn’t notice when grown women sucked their teeth or rolled their eyes when she passed. And Miss Ivoe was on her way to Austin, proof of something they used to say back in Alabama: “Sometimes it takes generations for opportunity to come, but if you keep on living, it will show up.”

Balancing an armful of pies, Lemon glanced around her yard. Three children, each having their own way with her heart: Timbo twisting it in worry; Irabelle stirring it in wonder; and Ivoe making it beat wild with pride.

“Got a lot to be grateful for this year,” she said to Zilpha Stokes. “Our girl’s on her way. And don’t think I don’t know it’s ’cause you been more than a teacher to her these years—you been a friend. Me and Ennis appreciate you taking the time with her, telling her things we don’t have half a mind to tell her. Helping her to school and all.”

At that moment, she saw Ennis welcome the Al-Halif family as they entered the yard.

“Mrs. Williams, Ivoe was made at home. You and your husband did all the molding. The most I ever did was clear the bramble off her path,” Zilpha said.

Irabelle ran laughingly between her mother and the teacher, chased by the Al-Halifs’ daughter and a little boy with skin like a bruised peach and golden hair. He belonged to a Moravian family newly arrived in Starkville.

“Times sure have changed, ain’t they? Go on and fix yourself a plate, Zilpha. Plenty to eat,” Lemon said, as she watched Timothy pull something from his shirt pocket and wave his hand before two young men she did not recognize. When they started away from the house she called out, “Timbo, time for you to eat. Say good-bye.”

“They just some fellows passing through from Bryan,” Timbo said, as he crossed the yard in her direction.

“You talking sugar but you giving salt. Just ’cause they both white don’t mean they taste the same. Passing through, my foot.”

“All right, Momma. They just come to tell me about a game. The dice level out my thinking.”

“Boy, you grieve me. All the time chasing the wrong things so the right things can’t catch you. Papa told you. I told you. Leave them devilish dice alone. Don’t play with Roena, Timbo, that ain’t the thing to do. Gonna fool around and lose that girl.”

A gleam in his eye brighter than the North Star, Timothy tucked a coin in her apron pocket. As long as luck was with him, that boy wouldn’t pay her no mind. Afraid to try but not scared enough to lose and he didn’t even know the difference.

“I done said what I had to say. I’m gone away from it.”

Later that evening Lemon stood on the porch between Ennis and May-Belle with a little brown jug.

“Zilpha, you want a taste of this whiskey? Maybe that one over there will fetch you a glass. You ain’t in Austin yet, missy,” Lemon called across the yard to Ivoe, reading the newspaper.

Before Ennis could put down the jug, Irabelle was at his feet, tugging on his pant leg to remind him of their routine. The first taste belonged to her, but because it was Juneteenth he nudged the bottle with the toe of his shoe to say she could have the last swig too. Irabelle jumped off the porch, her hair flowing like raven yarn. She twirled and blew into the empty jug, thinking of the women loggers down by the creek. Everyone clapped except Lemon.

Irabelle was a pretty child with few traces of her or Ennis. Except for the creamy skin of golden corals she was every bit of Lemon’s mother, Iraj, down to the small mouth and pronounced cheekbones. Her beauty was the easy kind. Folks gave themselves over to it quickly. But quick as looks caught them, looks could lose them. She wanted her daughter to cultivate something besides the accident of features, something that would earn loyalty, kindness, and make the right people want to be around her. Irabelle craved no more attention than her other children had at that age, but she was too young to know the trouble beauty brings. Beauty cowed folks too weak to resist it, embarrassed those shamed in their own skin. Irabelle was courting envy, inviting confusion, and didn’t even know it.

“All right, all right now,” Lemon gruffed. “Folks didn’t gather on this pretty day for you to entertain them.” She beckoned for the jug and rolled her eyes at Ennis. “I don’t know what you give it to her for. Ain’t done nothing but made extra work for me. Come morning, I’m liable to find that jug in pieces all over the yard.”

Irabelle slipped past her mother’s reach and scampered over to Timothy and Roena.

“You best give it to Momma, lessen you want one of them boo-hags to get you ’cause you at the age when they like to snatch little girls bald,” Timbo said.

Irabelle’s eyes grew big as saucers.

“You seven, ain’t you?”

“Yep. Old enough to know ain’t no such a thing as a boo-hag.”

“Just wait and see.”

“Ivoe?’ Irabelle said anxiously.

On the pallet beneath the fig tree, Ivoe was reading the paper. The headline gasped: “Shocking Incident in Snook! Negro Man Robs Widow!” A complete account of the crime scene included a full description of the perpetrator, who sounded to Ivoe like every man she knew in Little Tunis.

“Ivoe!” Irabelle repeated.

“Don’t pay Timbo no attention. The butter slipped off his noodle a long time ago,” Ivoe said.

Roena chuckled.

“Some folks all right till they get two pairs of britches,” Timothy muttered in Ivoe’s direction.

“Papa, ain’t no boo-hags that take girls’ hair, is it?”

Ennis tore off a piece from the hunk of brisket on his plate, looked down at Bunk waiting expectantly, and flung it. “Well, let me see. How good is your ciphering? When was Ivoe your age?”

“Nine years ago,” Irabelle chimed.

“Far as I can remember your sister never did lose no hair. Leastwise not to no boo-hag. I believe once she might’ve lost a bit wrestling with some Indian children.”

May-Belle and Lemon laughed.

“That rascal Timbo just pulling your leg. ’Cause even if it was a boo-hag after you, Papa would just get a ghostdog to take care of it. Papa told you about ghostdogs, didn’t I?” Ennis sat his plate on the porch, leaned forward, and rubbed his knees the way he did every time he was about to settle in for a story.

Irabelle shook her head, cautiously eyeing Bunk as he stretched out. Sometimes the boys in the churchyard talked about haint dogs, she recalled, climbing into her father’s lap.

Ivoe closed the paper and sat up. To hear her father tell a story was to witness great art. His voice resonated with power, wrapping itself around the listener like a quilt on a cold night, while his big hands painted vivid pictures to match his words, sturdy like oak—words you could live in until the warm baritone caught fire; then you were sure to burn in excitement.

“Used to be Saturday was the day cotton pickers would come from all around and have a slap-bang-up time jugging and jawing just like we doing today. While the sun was making up its mind on when to set, somebody would commence to playing on the banjo or the fiddle. Nobody never did the musician no dirt about paying him neither. He could count on getting at least a dollar for the night. Sometimes we danced till the rooster crowed on Sunday morning. May-Belle, you remember what we used to say? We had us a saying back then: ‘If a white man could be a Negro in the Bottoms just one Saturday, he never would want to be white no more.’”

May-Belle let out a lazy laugh where the first note was drawn out like the final whistle of a freight train.

“Once, a fiddler was late getting off from Snook on account of he brought his baby brother with him. See, they momma had just died and they daddy was working all the time, so the fiddler had to keep the little one with him.”

Irabelle nestled against her father’s warm chest that vibrated when he spoke, tickling her back a little. Momma had just the right words to fit Timbo. Even if he didn’t mind her all the time, he listened. May-Belle and Ivoe had their own special talk; you could tell it by all their private laughter. But Papa melded words just for her.

“Well, they’s traveling and the fiddler’s getting a little tired, but he don’t wanna stop because he worried about reaching the Bottoms late. See, he don’t want nobody bird-dogging for the dance he fixing to play for. Well, the fiddler’s baby brother commenced to looking real pitiful and starts in with how his little legs is aching him. Fiddler know he can’t hardly make it with the boy, but where in the world can he leave him?”

Irabelle curled her fingers around one of Papa’s ears, burying her other hand in his coarse hair.

“The fiddler scratched at his head.” Ennis scratched his own head. “What was he gonna do? That’s when he noticed an ole cottonseed house a piece-ways down the road. He was plum tickled about finding a place to leave baby brother, so he snatched the little rascal up like this here”—he grabbed Irabelle around the waist, holding on to ensure she didn’t fall from his lap—“and took off running. When they reached the house his tongue was hanging out his mouth just like a dog what been chasing a rabbit. He takes his brother by one hand, his fiddle in the other, and climbs up the ladder and through the window. Cottonseed piled so high in there—almost to the top of the ceiling—that baby brother barely have room to stretch hisself out. He finally get fixed so he can lay down. Fiddler gives him a paper sack with some ginger snaps in it and tells him he’ll be right back. Now, the fiddler ain’t been gone but a minute when baby brother hears a puffing noise and raise his head to see what the trouble is. What you reckon he saw?”

Irabelle hunched her shoulders. She couldn’t bear to delay the story with guesswork.

“A great big ole puff of smoke come through that window and scared baby brother, so he commenced to shaking like the front wheel of your papa’s cart. Took him a long time to get up enough courage to look. What you think he saw this time? A great big white dog was looking down at him. Scared him so bad he started in to hollering and peed hisself too. He thinking that dog gonna bite him for sure, maybe even carry him off somewhere and he won’t never see his big brother again. But the dog stayed right where he was. Didn’t budge an inch. Didn’t make a sound. Finally, the little boy see the dog don’t act like he got any interest in biting him so he doze off. His brother’s fiddle wakes him up. Ghostdog still standing over him too. But before the fiddler reach the house the dog turn into smoke again and floated out the window. When the fiddler climbed in, baby brother told him what happened. His brother allowed that the dog was they momma what done come back from the grave to keep a watch over the little one so he could earn a little money playing music for the cotton pickers to dance.”

The Williamses lounged beneath a cornflower-blue sky all afternoon. The chickweed grass, coarse and brilliant green, gave the earth a spongy feel beneath Ivoe, who lay stretched out with the newspaper over her stomach. The branches of a blackjack oak stirred a slight breeze for Roena and Timothy while they played cards in the fleeting twilight. Lemon crossed before Ennis’s chair, causing his eyes to light up like stars as he reached out to pat her behind. Irabelle, playing in May-Belle’s hair, watched a jaybird flutter away from the fig tree just as Bunk rolled onto his stomach, extending his forepaws on the porch he dusted with a fanning sweep of his tail. For a moment nothing stirred except now and then the call of a screech owl. They didn’t have much but this happiness was their own.

.

Momma could look at a long face all day without it getting to her, Irabelle thought, but Papa was different. A poked-out mouth and droopy chin did the trick. “Come on then—with your sad face on.” Her first time away from Little Tunis marked a special occasion. Momma had even let her wear her best Sunday go-to-meeting dress—pink polka dot cotton with scalloped redwork trim—to escort Papa to Snook.

After Papa’s business, they strolled about town hand-in-hand. On Snook’s Main Street she heard the sweetest sound coming from the shop on the corner. Papa must’ve liked it too because he stopped to listen. On account of the hawthorn hedge, which she recognized by its little white flowers that would give way to tiny red berries come fall—one of Momma’s favorites—she couldn’t get close enough to the window, so Papa picked her up for the first time since she was five, two years ago. Together they watched the wood box with a plate spinning ’round and ’round beneath a giant golden bellflower.

“How you think them tiny people got in there? See, it’s iddy-biddy people no bigger than your pinky toe down there making that pretty music come out.”

Irabelle let Papa pull her leg while she wondered about the music. This was nothing like the singing and moaning she heard at Old Elam Church—no banjo plucking, or whining fiddle either. The shopkeeper said it was an a-ree-ah from an opry called Bow-He-Men Girl. She didn’t know what a Bow-He-Men Girl looked like or did, but from that day forward she was going to be one—unless Ivoe told her that was no kind of thing for a colored girl to be. Ivoe was always telling her what she ought to want to be and do.

“That right there sounds like the wind whistling pretty to me,” Papa said. You could tell he didn’t know about opry either. The shopkeeper said a clarinet made that pretty whistling sound.

“I want a clarinet.”

Ennis recalled Juneteenth when Irabelle had played the little brown jug. The tax bill was coming due but his decision was made. “Sir, how much for the music and that what you play it on?”

The clerk glanced at the money in Ennis’s hand and laid his newspaper aside. Generally he didn’t do any dirt by Negro customers because their money spent like anybody else’s. The Snook Chronicle was to blame. Every day for the last week some Negro’s face was blasted on the front page accompanied by a story about a robbery, a fire, or some kind of mischief. He told Ennis to hold on while he got everything together and disappeared to the back room. In his call to the sheriff, he described his customers as well-dressed Negroes with more money than a Negro ought to have. He wrapped the Edison Home Phonograph and returned to the front of the store.

There was the usual hem-hawing about the heat between the shopkeeper and the deputy while the sheriff studied Ennis. His hands were blistered and calloused; he’d picked enough cotton for three people. “A Victrola’s mighty frivolous, boy.” He eyed the pretty little girl whose legs, the color of wheat stalks, put him in the mind of a beautiful boy he knew in his youth. The sheriff turned Irabelle away from the phonograph and patted her head. Hair as soft as Ory’s had been. Squatting at her feet, his gaze met with the most extraordinary dark violet eyes. He tried to soften his own face to coax a smile from the child, but she only stared back at him, twisting the ends of her dress. He unfastened each finger from the dress bottom and, gripping the edges himself, pulled the dress taut.

Irabelle wobbled a little.

“You like music?”

Irabelle turned to look at her father. Papa nodded so she did the same.

“You got a name?”

“Irabelle,” she whispered.

The simple action of rising to his feet seemed to require effort from the sheriff. He had been at the jailhouse very late last night keeping watch over two colored boys. Then, like now, his lust had surprised him. Instead of pouring out for his wife, it seemed only to spring forth for the most pitiful. He yanked Irabelle in front of him, his hands on her shoulders like heavy weights, and looked at Ennis.

“Who are you, boy?”

“Ennis Williams, sir. That’s my youngest child there, Irabelle. We from Little Tunis.” Wasn’t no shame in being a colored man, but it sure in the hell was tedious at times. For every question they asked you, you better give at least three answers.

“What’s your business in Snook?”

“I’m a blacksmith, sir. Come to collect my pay on a job I did for Mr. Jacobson. My baby girl ain’t never seen these parts, so soon as my business ended we set in to take in your town.”

The county jail never stayed so full as it did in June, thought the sheriff. Something about Juneteenth made Negroes step out of line. “Whereabouts you say you from?”

“Little Tunis—”

“Them darkies that live in the bottoms of Starkville,” the deputy added.

The sheriff leaned down to Irabelle’s ear and said in a kindly voice, “Your daddy’s fixing to buy some music so you can listen at home. I bet you’d like that. Wouldn’t you?” The sound of her “yes,” bright as a bell, could have belonged to Ory. He gripped the bony shoulders too hard before turning his attention back to Ennis. “You say you was here doing work for Jacobson?”

“Yes, sir. A little ironwork out at the ranch.”

“He pay you enough to buy all this here? Deputy, you ever knowed Jacobson to pay so much?”

“Well, sir, I’m doing all right for myself. You ask anybody in Little Tunis they vouch for me. I’m a hardworking man. And I never goes nowhere without no money.”

“I bet you is what they call a hardly working man. Ain’t no need in worrying about money ’cause what you can’t earn you can just steal. Ain’t that right?”

“No, sir. I don’t steal and my family don’t steal. We works for what we needs and what we wants.”

“Deputy, name me one Negro you know above lying.”

“Can’t say I can, Sheriff.”

“You see, boy,” the sheriff started in Ennis’s direction. “We had us a most unfortunate incident here in Snook a week ago. A widow had her wedding ring stolen, her finger plum tore off by a thieving Negro man. A hardworking blacksmith like you, after you melted it down, I imagine you fetched a pretty penny for it. Ain’t that right?”

Ennis gulped. From the corner of his eye he saw the deputy reach into his holster. If he grabbed Irabelle and ran, they’d shoot him. And Lord only knew what they might do to her.

“Now, sir, I wasn’t nowhere near Snook a week ago. I only been here once this year and that was on May twenty-seventh and May twenty-eighth.” His voice was soft and steady. “I got my own money what spend like everybody else’s. We don’t want no trouble.”

“I’ll tell you how this is gonna go. I’m fixing to have my deputy check to see if you got the ring on you. Maybe you come back to return it ’cause you got some kind of conscience. I’ll search the child myself.”

Irabelle lurched toward her father but the sheriff pulled her closer, his hands trembling as he groped her back and shoulders.

It was very long ago but the sheriff remembered still. Running down to the smokehouse every Saturday evening after ten long hours in the fields with the other orphans. The colored boys he picked cotton with numbered six; he was the only white one, which meant he got special attention or none at all. More than anything, he liked to watch what went on behind the smokehouse, where arguments over who would touch whom ended in a group circle. Colored boys were something to look at. They came in all colors and sizes, but none was as perfect as the youngest, Ory—an angel from the Bible, except he was better than pale (too deathlike), he was the color of butterscotch. Whenever the sheriff closed his eyes there was the picture to beat all pictures, still: Ory with his britches midthigh while the others worked to make that angel face break. By his fourteenth birthday, the sheriff had the courage to demand his turn with Ory in the circle. He trembled in delight as Ory unbuttoned his pants, oblivious to the gunshots. Three or four rang in the air like angry church bells while someone yelled, “Get—you nasty boys.” He didn’t care about meeting his maker if it meant he could touch Ory, but the boy took off.

“Please, sir, we didn’t come for no ugliness,” Papa said, twisting in the deputy’s hold.

Irabelle felt the buckle of the sheriff’s belt knocking against her back.

“I ain’t got nothing she ain’t seen before or won’t see soon enough, pretty as she is.” The sheriff pulled her head back and shoved two fat fingers into her mouth. He poked under her tongue, along the sides of her jaws, the back of her throat, making her gag while Papa did nothing. If the sheriff had asked she would’ve told him she would never try to eat a ring. At school a little boy had choked on a marble and almost died. The belt buckle clanged faster. She was going to get a whipping in a store by a white man and Papa wasn’t doing a thing about it. Her knees felt weak. Maybe the sheriff’s did too because he gripped one of her shoulders even harder now. Papa’s growl sounded worse than any sick animal she ever heard. He sobbed words she did not understand. And then the sheriff released her.

Papa groaned as the deputy let him go and Irabelle ran over to him.

“No ring.”

A few miles beyond Snook, Papa drew his cart to the side of the road. “Don’t you never tell nobody about what happened.” He squeezed her shoulders, forgetting his strength, until she began to cry. “You hear me?”

“Yes, Papa.”

Everything about the trip was horrible, Irabelle thought an hour later as her father lifted her from the seat down to the ground in their yard. Now Papa hated her dress. No spills or dirt anywhere, but before she could reach the steps, he made her take it off. She stepped out of the dress and ran to the cabin. She wondered why Papa lied to Momma that evening. She had not torn the dress so badly that it was beyond mending.

.

September nightfall brought no reprieve from the heat. Ennis hammered the ground, blinking back perspiration. He dabbed his forehead with the back of his hand, turned his head, and caught the full length of the man’s body. The man must’ve been blind to miss a boulder that big. Must’ve been driving the horse too hard and fast ’cause when Ennis came up on the cart it was a pile of lumber and the man was crumpled up against the tree. Looked like his arm and leg were broken. “Take my horse, go into town, and get help,” the man said. Horse was hurting but it would be all right. Ennis thought about ripping the shirt off the man’s back to plug the hole bleeding from his head when he saw a small black case on the ground near a wheel still spinning on its axle. In fits and starts, the man explained that he had been on his way to Caldwell to play at a circus.

Ennis screwed the three wooden pieces together, but blowing into it didn’t sound like much of nothing. “This a clarinet—ain’t it?”

Ennis wondered if anyone had seen him leave his shed that evening. Wasn’t nothing for a Negro to up and disappear, but sooner or later they’d come looking for this man.

“See, you can’t all the time do what you got a mind to do, even if you thinking with your right mind. You laying there thinking I’m studying on you with my wrong mind. It ain’t that. Can’t take you to May-Belle’s. She liable not to be home and ain’t gonna do me a bit of good to get caught with a ailin’ white man. I could tell it just like what you and me know to be true and they still gonna find some wrong in it. Can’t help you, sir.”

He couldn’t end the man’s life or leave him there to rot. It took a few hours for the bleeding to kill him. Ennis used a rock to hew out a grave, took the clarinet, and started for home.