Old Man, are you going to tell on me? asks Soon, and old man does not sound like an insult at all, but quite the opposite: conspiratorial and gentle. He looks at her without blinking: tell on you for what?, he asks, and Soon doesn’t know if it’s a joke or if he’s being serious. Does this old man not understand anything? In any case I look sixteen, when people ask me I’ve said I’m sixteen and they’ve always believed me—you yourself, Old Man, thought I was older than I was! (Although it’s not true that anyone has asked her age, or that she believes she looks older than she is, and nor is her confidence genuine as she brags about her appearance—in reality, she has so many doubts.)

In the middle of October the weather is variable; in the early morning, when Soon arrives, it’s still cool and the damp grass gives off a more fragrant scent, almost sweetish, which dissipates and dries up as the hours pass. But from twelve o’clock on, like now, it can even get hot, and the pits of Soon’s knees start to sweat from sitting so many hours with her legs bent. Old Man crosses through the hedges—he’s bent over, and once he’s through, the greenery closes behind him—and he looks at her with shining eyes, pleased to find her there, as if her very presence each time were a formidable gift. Look, he says, I brought you something.

Clumsy with nerves, he takes some headphones from his jacket pocket, unrolls them, plugs them into a cell phone, and focuses on pushing the buttons, which he does very slowly. Listen, he says finally as he hands her the headphones, and she promptly fits them into her ears.

What comes through them is a woman’s clear, deep voice, an ambiguous voice, slightly masculine, thunderous, but it’s the clean, booming thunder of a wave crashing against a jetty, a voice that enfolds her and carries her up and then down, and in the background there’s a sax, or a trumpet—Soon doesn’t know—a wind instrument that blends into the voice, intertwining, instrument with voice and voice with instrument, rising and falling as if competing or dancing. She closes her eyes, listens, listens very intently, though she never entirely forgets that Old Man is watching her. When the song rises and rises and rises and finally breaks before falling suddenly to its end, she hands the headphones back and says: it’s pretty. Old Man nods, smiles, thanks her. He thanks her, not the other way around, thinks Soon: it’s all so strange.

Nina Simone, murmurs the Old Man, that’s Nina Simone, but it’s a name Soon has never heard before. It’s possible that what he likes most in the world, says Old Man, after birds, or just as much as birds, is that woman’s voice—and when you think about it, they’re practically the same thing. She was a singular woman, he explains, spent her whole life fighting for her people, but she wasn’t always well understood, and when Soon asks who her people were, Old Man says: black people! Soon did like the song, she wouldn’t be at all opposed to listening to it again, but she’s not terribly interested in the story Old Man is telling her now, full of dates and names and more dates and more names that inevitably make her attention wander. Nina Simone, says the Old Man, was a stage name, just like how the two of them assumed new names, Soon and Old Man, to escape their real ones, which are prisons. When Nina was a little girl named Eunice, the Jim Crow laws were in force—Jiiim Crooow, Soon slowly repeats—separate but equal, or each with his own, explains Old Man. That is, whites over here and blacks over there, no mixing, but there went little Eunice every day, off to a white neighborhood to take her piano classes, day in and day out of people cursing her and throwing stones—who did that monkey think she was, setting foot on their white sidewalks?—and even so she kept going, she was brave, and she really liked music!