She looked down the row of unpainted shotgun shacks, the idle men loitering, smoking, pitching pennies. Negro men. On the sagging porches, black women rocked infants. Skinny dogs roamed in packs, chased by motley bands of Negro children.

“Time you saw where your children go when they go home.”

“I’ve been in Negro neighborhoods before.” She thought, we saw this from the window of the train, but it looks worse up close. She felt, irrationally, that her dark hair and brown skin weren’t dark enough.

“You’ve been in places where the people go to work every day. For most of these men, work is seasonal. Seventy-five, maybe a hundred dollars a year.”

“A year? How do they live?”

“You tell me.”

“But so many of the women work—in private homes, taking in laundry, fancy sewing.”

“The best ones can charge three dollars a week,” he said. “Now that the Irish are trying to push them out, wages have dipped some.”

The Irish? Sam had told her about Mike Dowling and his Red Shirts—was all that fuss about menial jobs? “Supply and demand,” she said. “When the labor pool gets smaller, they’ll have to pay more again.”

“Half the men in this city are out of work right now—white and black. They’re not interested in Adam Smith.”

“Just how is it you know so much about it? You got here the same time I did.”

“For me, it was a homecoming, teacher. The Lord brought me back.”

Whenever anybody started talking about doing the will of God, she shuddered: somebody was going to suffer, soon.

She walked on, looking straight ahead. Heads turned as she approached, voices murmured as she passed. It was foolish to be here, a white woman walking with a black man she hardly knew. But then she scolded herself: why shouldn’t she walk with a colored man? Why shouldn’t she visit any part she pleased of the city where she lived? If she was really going to start a family in this place, she could not do it in fear.

“Poverty is awful,” she said after a few steps. “What do you expect me to do about it?”

He bowed his legs, as if he were about to draw a sword. He whipped his right hand up suddenly and nearly jabbed her in the eye with his finger. He whispered, “It’s not the poverty of their bodies that enrages me, teacher, but the poverty of their spirits.”

“Blessed are the poor in spirit.” She slapped down his finger. Ivanhoe Grant smiled, and she suddenly felt mean.