“You read don’t you, Billy?”
“When I got to. Gives me a headache. Why? What you want, Sitwell?”
Mr. Sitwell put the book on the counter. “I want you to find the name Wash Talbot in there. I need to know whether he’s colored or not.”
Billy shook his head. “Afraid I’m gonna have to charge you for that. Not so much for the reading as the headache that comes with it.”
Mr. Sitwell pulled a penny from his pocket.
Billy took the coin and picked up the book. He flipped through the pages, stopping every time he saw the name Wash Talbot written inside. The name appeared several times, usually in relation to some shoot-out or robbery. It was clear, from the brief passages Billy read aloud, that this Wash was not part of any community Mr. Sitwell remembered but rather a brutal savage who’d spent his youth as a lawless outlaw hiding in the swamps.
Furthermore, Billy assured him, the book’s Wash was, like the man on the cover and all the other people inside, without question white.
He shut the book. “Satisfied?”
Mr. Sitwell shook his head. Whoever wrote the book, if they hadn’t even got that part right, surely didn’t know what they were talking about. Perhaps the author had heard of the terrible events that had taken place in Seminole after Wash Talbot’s murder and simply fabricated what he considered to be a suitable tale to precede it. The fire that had destroyed his village and sent Mr. Sitwell running all the way to the northern city where he now lived had, in truth, sent people running from all over the county. Perhaps someone told the book’s author about the violence, or maybe he’d read about it in a newspaper. The rest he must have made up on his own.
He looked at the cover again and could feel his confusion give way to anger. What did this Cherokee and a white Wash have to do with his people, with him? And now there was someone sitting in the Barclays’ parlor, claiming relation to the man on the cover, passing out this book full of lies?
He slapped the book back on the counter. “See if it’s got a Lotta Smith in there.”
“Why? Who’s that?”
“My mama.”
“Mama? I didn’t know you had a mama.”
Mr. Sitwell narrowed his eyes. “Everybody got a mama, fool.”
“I know, I just . . .”
Someone walked to the counter wanting his mail. Billy sighed and shook his head.
“Give me a minute.” He went to fetch their mail.
When he came back Mr. Sitwell asked him, “How much I have to pay you to just go ahead and read the whole thing?”
“What do you mean? You mean read it to you? This whole book?”
“I got some questions. Need you to read enough to answer my questions.”
“In that case, the cost is gonna depend on what your questions are.”
Mr. Sitwell told him what he wanted to know and they agreed on a price. He gave Billy his money and went upstairs to his room.
He unlocked the door and tossed his keys on his table. He changed out of his clothes and watered his plants. Then he clicked off the light and went to bed.
That night Mr. Sitwell had troublesome sleep, full of strange dreams he did not understand. In the one he remembered when he woke up the next morning, he was lying in the grass reading a book when he felt someone reach down and tap him on the shoulder. He looked up and saw a woman in a long white dress standing over him, one hand gripping the bar handle of a mask with a face drawn on it, which she held in front of her own.
“Put that away,” she called from behind the mask.
Mr. Sitwell looked down at the book in his hands. “But this is the best part.”
“Fair enough,” the woman said. “But you’re gonna have to finish it later.”
She held out her free hand.
“Right now, we’ve got to go.”
2
A Matter of Taste
Mr. Sitwell woke up the next morning feeling no more rested than he had the night before. He lay on his back and stared at a long, thin crack that ran along his ceiling like a vein for a full twenty minutes before he even realized that he was actually awake. Then he turned his head, saw the potted plant on the windowsill beside his bed, the washbasin on the stand in the corner beneath the mirror, and the small wooden table and single chair in the middle of the floor. Somehow soothed by the blank familiarity of his own room, he realized he was no longer angry.
If anything, he had a hard time recalling how he’d managed to work himself into such a state the night before. It wasn’t like him, and he felt a little silly thinking back to how he’d slapped that dollar on the counter and demanded Billy find answers to questions that, in the clear light of day, no longer seemed to matter much at all. He already knew the book was full of lies. And even if that wasn’t the case, it was hard to see why it should have made such a difference. That was his past, a reminder of a world he barely remembered and far from the life he lived now.
Out in the hall one of the other men renting a room on the second floor cleared his throat as he shuffled past Mr. Sitwell’s door on his way to the washroom. Mr. Sitwell had lived in the house since he was sixteen years old, when he’d had to clear out of the Barclays’ cellar to make room for a new group of orphans; the two he’d arrived with had been caught stealing and sent away long before. Things were harder back then; it had been difficult to find a place to live that was both decent and affordable and also in a neighborhood that didn’t prohibit colored people from moving in. He’d felt lucky to find a room in a gas-lit house on Union Street with an elderly widow willing to rent out one of her bedrooms to him. Then, a few years later, the widow, eager to profit from a sudden influx of colored people moving to the city, had paid to have renovations done to the downstairs, installed a proper front desk, and converted the parlor and library into four additional rentable rooms. The result had been a sharp decline in quality as suddenly Mr. Sitwell found himself no longer renting a room in a house but living in a proper rooming house.
“That’s what I said. Isn’t that what I just said?” a woman’s voice came through the wall. Technically, women weren’t allowed inside, but the widow was hard of hearing and if you slipped Billy enough money, pretty much anything was possible. The man living on the other side of the wall was a Pullman porter who only used the room for weekend trysts when he was in town. The other two rooms on Mr. Sitwell’s floor were currently occupied by a waiter and a nervous man who was unemployed but claimed he was a hairdresser by trade. Mr. Sitwell didn’t expect they’d be there long; people passing through the house now rented a room for a month or two while they were looking for something else—sometimes something better but more often, something even cheaper. Still, Mr. Sitwell saw no reason to leave. He was comfortable enough and so, at the age of thirty-four, was technically the building’s most senior occupant, aside from the widow herself.
“You better tell that heifer to let you alone,” the woman shouted through the wall. He listened as she and the porter laughed. Then he stood up, grabbed his towel from his nightstand, and washed his face in the basin. He put on his clothes, locked the door, and walked downstairs.
He pushed through the front door and stepped out into the gray dawn. Mr. Sitwell walked two blocks and made his way to the corner stop, where a row of women in sturdy shoes was already waiting for the omnibus. When it arrived they all climbed aboard and together rode past the two-story brick buildings that made up much of the south side.