“Your brother is both foolish and stubborn,” Dad continued. “I am not going to have you copy him, understand! Your name is George Brown and nothing else—no African mumbo-jumbo! And he is Lloyd Brown. If I catch you repeating any of his dangerous and stupid remarks, I’ll see that you don’t do it again. Your brother has just about broken your mother’s heart. You look at her—look at her good, boy! Do you want her to cry like that over you? Do you?” Dad’s voice was close to a roar.

“No—no, sir,” Ras found an answer. What had Shaka—Lloyd—done?

“You had better remember that! Your brother has chosen his own way. He’s left this house and he is not coming back as long as he talks the kind of treasonable rubbish he spouted out this morning! I served my country”—Dad ran his hands over his face and then rubbed his forehead as if he had a bad ache behind it—“I did not want to go in the army, very few men do. But there was a war on and I believed in what we were fighting for. I’m not an African—I’m an American, and I’m proud of it—proud, do you understand! And I’m not going to have treason talked in this house! I only hope Lloyd will come to his senses in time. He has a good brain, why doesn’t he use it?”

Dad went back to the window. Mom wiped her eyes on a tissue from her apron pocket. “He’s a good boy underneath all that foolishness, Evan. He’ll come back, I know he will. I—well, it just surprised me so, his saying he was going to live with that awful Ali man. I guess I was shaken up. But I know it will all come out all right—Lloyd’s a good boy.”

Dad made some kind of a noise and Mom got up and went to stand beside him, her hand on his shoulder. Ras swallowed, picked up the laundry bag. So Shaka had left as he had threatened to do. Ras had seen Ali once—a thin man with a little pointed beard and a quick, angry way of talking. He was the one who had started Shaka reading all the African books.

Those books! Had Shaka taken them with him? Ras left the clothes in the hall and slipped upstairs. Shaka’s room was bare, except that his closet door was open and hanging inside was his good suit, the one he hardly ever wore any more. There was a drawer pulled crookedly out of the bureau, but it was empty. And there were light places on the wall where his posters had been. Yes, the bookshelf was bare.