Albritten sipped her tea, the smile fading as she looked into a bitter distance. “You have to understand, this was a hard town to be black in. They fancied themselves, the white folks did, they fancied themselves because they were descended from the people who made Kansas a free state back in 1861, but they weren’t descended from John Brown, no, ma’am. They wanted a town that was all white, and so they kept black folk over here in the river bottom. Black children drowned in that river every summer—they weren’t allowed in the pools in town.

“Restaurants, only five restaurants in town would serve a meal to a black person. We sat in a corner of the balcony in the movie theaters. They had a Ku Klux Klan chapter up at the university, and the basketball coach—he’s like a saint or a hero in this town—he was a big Klan booster. When Wilt Chamberlain showed up, he made them change some of their ways, but it went on for a long, long time. Ferguson, all these black boys being killed today, it’s just another chapter in a long book.”

She looked at me again, the same measuring look she’d given in the doorway. “I worried about Jordan over at the high school. They wouldn’t let him into the college-prep classes, you see. One of the women I cleaned house for, she was on the school board, I tried to talk to her about it: my Jordan was as smart as any boy in that school. She fired me on the spot. Uppity, I was. When he organized a protest among the black students, I was afraid for what would happen to him. Soon as he graduated, off he went to Vietnam, no college deferment for him. Although he made it through Howard when he finally came home safe again.”

A sense of shame made me hold myself completely still, the glass of iced tea freezing my fingers. Peppy looked worriedly from me to Ms. Albritten but fortunately didn’t move.

She gave a heavy sigh. “This part of town, in the river bottom, this was where we were supposed to live and get over to the main town as best we could to do the dirty work, the heavy lifting. The house where Emerald and Lucinda lived, where little Katniss is now, it was like most of the houses over here—no real floor, just plywood over the dirt. When the flood came, that plywood was no more cover than an umbrella in a blizzard. Water pushed up—it happened so fast we were lucky we got away with our lives. We lost everything. Lucinda, her wedding pictures, her man in uniform on his way to the fighting, all that disappeared like dishwater down a drain. I managed to save my grandmother’s silver spoons and the family Bible, but that was all.