“Yes. Of course, I know that. It’s just . . . I didn’t know you had a child.”
Jennie frowned. “That’s because I didn’t think it was appropriate to talk about such things at my place of employment. It’s nobody’s business. I do my job and then I come home. Alone. Understand?”
“Yes. Of course.”
Jennie narrowed her eyes.
“Why don’t you run along now, Sitwell? You’ve done enough. Got me safely to my door. Think about whether you still want to have dinner sometime. And when you decide, let me know.”
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, of course I do.”
He shook his head. He didn’t understand what was happening but could feel things going wrong. He knew he needed to change the subject. He still had his hand wrapped around the book in his pocket; he pulled it out and tried to smile.
“You really been to school?”
“Why? I said so, didn’t I? Never said I graduated. Got through a whole semester at the nurses’ college before I had to stop. Had responsibilities. But I’m not a liar if that’s what you—”
“No, I didn’t mean . . .”
It was hopeless. He could feel a foul mood creeping up on him, like a shadow.
“I should let you see to your daughter.”
“Yes, you should,” Jennie said. “Thanks again for walking me. Real nice of you. But maybe now you’ll understand when I tell you it’s not necessary. I’ve got no problem taking care of myself, Sitwell.”
“Yes, ma’am. . . .” He tipped his hat. “I understand.”
He turned around and started walking home.
It seemed as if he’d messed up everything, first with the boys and then with Jennie. He tried to remember what he’d thought would happen that night and found that vast parts of his mind were blank. It seemed nothing but foolish to have imagined she might have liked him. She belonged with the bright happy pretty people who rode the streetcar. People whose eyes danced when they talked. People who swayed.
The city was full of them and as he moved down the sidewalk they were all around him, everywhere he looked. Everybody rushing past him in a hurry to get somewhere. As long as he’d been in that city he’d never felt like he truly belonged. A part of him would always be country; his true home would always be a small village hidden in the swamps of Seminole County that, for the first nine years of his life, was the only world he had known. Founded by three runaway slaves back in days when much of the state was still unsettled land; they’d stolen a map from the man who’d owned them, run toward its nearest edge, and then kept running, wanting nothing more than to get off it. They’d made a home in the swamps, out of a landscape so wild and unmanageable that for a long time no one thought to claim it. Over time they had been joined by others—runaways like Sitwell’s mother and his uncle Max, vanquished indigenous, deserters from various wars. For years they’d kept safe by sticking together and keeping to themselves. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that people like Sitwell’s mother and Wash Talbot started venturing outside, lured by the promise of paper money in exchange for work in what was by then one of several nearby towns.
He pulled the book out again and stared at the cover: a sneering white man whose eyes had been rendered a vivid green. And there in the quiet of his own thoughts, he started to remember things. He remembered how, as a child back in Seminole, he’d once met a man with eyes that color, and also that, when he’d asked who the man was and what he was doing there, his mother told him he’d come to attend funeral services for Wash. But aside from the color of his eyes, the man on the cover, with his straight hair, long beard, and top lip curled back in a savage grin, looked nothing like the one he was thinking of. That man had been small and compact, with a smooth, tan face and a high, bushy mop of brown hair. Mr. Sitwell couldn’t recall the man’s name, but he’d never forget the day he’d showed up on his mother’s doorstep. It was the day before the shooting started and the last time he’d helped his mother bake a cake.
Mr. Sitwell kept walking. Before she ran away his mother had been a slave in a grand house in St. Augustine; it was there that she’d learned to cook. She was so good at it that even after Wash’s hanging, when all the other villagers who worked in the town had been sent home and told not to come back, Mrs. Farley, the woman his mother cooked for, had kept his mother on because Mr. Farley’s birthday was coming up and Mrs. Farley wanted a cake.
He rounded a corner and remembered how, when he and his mother got into the wagon to go to town that last morning, the green-eyed man had sat on their porch waving good-bye. And when they returned that afternoon he was still sitting there, a rifle laid across his lap.
“How did it go, Lotta?” he’d asked Sitwell’s mother.
“About what you expected.”
The man helped her unload the wagon then followed them back inside the small cabin they shared with Uncle Max. Sitwell’s mother took off her jacket. She set her bag down on the kitchen table and said, “Mr. Farley called you a ghost nigger.”
“Did he now?” The man smiled. “Well, now, Lotta, I got to admit. That’s actually kind of funny.”
Mr. Sitwell stared at the book’s cover. Was that man Cherokee Red? A colored version to go with the colored Wash? Mr. Sitwell could not recall ever seeing him before the day he showed up for Wash’s funeral and didn’t remember ever being told the man’s actual name. But of course he must have been told; it was just that so many people had come back to attend Wash’s service and he hadn’t known which ones he should be paying attention to, hadn’t known what was important to remember. It was entirely possible that other people had called the man Cherokee and Mr. Sitwell had simply forgotten.
Now, amid the noise and clatter of the city streets, the man’s voice came back to him, followed by his mother’s laughter. Sounds from his past, which, though soothing in some ways, were not actually comforting. Because he missed those sounds and hearing them again only reminded him of how alone he now was, how far from anything that resembled home. They reminded him of a time when he’d been part of a world he hadn’t paid much attention to because he’d never imagined himself being outside of it. Reminded him that his real home would always be a small village in the swamps of Florida that twenty-five years before he’d been forced to stand and watch as it burned to the ground.
All these memories summoned by a book he hadn’t even read. Things he hadn’t thought about in years seemed to push against his current mood, filling him with a sense that there was something he was supposed to do. He looked at the cover. The man staring back at him sure looked white, but what if he’d only been drawn that way? There’d been people in his village who looked just as white as the Barclays, a couple of them with blond hair and blue eyes. But they’d been colored; he’d known they were colored simply by the fact that they were there. That’s how things were in Seminole County; everybody seemed to just know who belonged where. If the man who drew the cover didn’t understand that, he might have gotten confused.
He turned another corner, walked across the street, and finally saw the awning for his rooming house. He passed through the door and made his way to the front desk where Billy, the nephew of the woman who owned the house, was working behind the counter.