I’m sorry, sir. There . . . there was a party . . . it was opening night.

Don’t mumble to me, boy. You been drinking.

Sir?

I said have you been drinking?—Of course you have. Look at you. Just look at you.

I said . . . I said I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.

I know it won’t.

There had once been hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, up and down the East Coast, Zeke had read. Also, he had read, this was the last one standing. He remembered hearing his grandpappy telling tales of the slave markets, how the folks were treated when placed on the block. He reckoned there was no way he could imagine the humiliation.

The Fayetteville slave market stood in the center of traffic, in what Zeke figured to be the center of town, or near its center anyway. Red brick. Fancy arches. Flowers. He could not count the times he had actually been to Fayetteville, nor the times he had seen the . . . monument? . . . but he had always been disappointed. Surely a slave market should have been a vast, oppressive thing, to his mind, to represent what it represented. But no. Look at it. A sorry excuse for a one-room house. And he had heard that the city council wanted to tear it down, said it just stood there dredging up old hurts, but there was a lot of ruckus over the fact that it was one of two or three left. Some people felt it was necessary to preserve it. As a warning. Or at least a reminder. He didn’t know what to think.

The car moved along in the traffic like a barge on a busy river, a multitude of different-colored cars—reds, blues, whites, blacks—flowed past them, honking their horns, jerking and going. Jimmy made only one turn, bore right at a fork and pretty soon after reaching town, they were there.

Memorial Hospital was a great brick block that sat, not atop a hill, but more in a valley, down. Across the road from the entrance rose a cemetery with bleached white markers sitting like white birds awaiting a good wind to take them away. The lawn of the hospital, now green in winter rye, sloped downward in a great, green wave. The parking lot, binding the green on either side, a wide maze of asphalt and yellow streaks, was bordered by rows of cedar trees shaped like cones. Too perfect to seem real. Jimmy wound around the lot until they found a free space and parked. Cold air, yet warmer than earlier that day, rushed in when the door was opened, striking them across their faces, their necks, their hands. Zeke wondered when his joints would begin to hurt again.

“Well, Miss Ruth, looks like we’re here.”

April 30, 1984 1:15 am

April 30, 1984

1:15 am