‘In Alabama, the blacks were treated worse than the animals. If a black man worked on a farm, then the horses and livestock would get priority over him for food, warmth and shelter. Most niggers slept in an outhouse. Some brought up whole families scratching in the dirt, working on a small place for food and maybe a few clothes. Children there worked from the time they could walk and feed the poultry. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. But it’s hotter’n hell for a nigger come summertime and colder than an icebox for a nigger come fall.

‘So, my mother picked up with a half-chat called Rusty Dorsey, a big, smooth-talking man. I can’t remember him too well, but I can remember his voice. Like brown molasses, sweet and thick and syrupy. My mother bred four children in three years to him. I was the first. My sisters came after. He worked around, had a trade kind of, good with wood. My mammy always said that he could make a piece of tree bend itself whichever which way he wanted it to. Well, he left. We woke up one mornin’ and he was long gone. Liselle, my mammy, broke her heart, and lived in hope of his coming back. Never did, of course, ‘cept he’d turn up when he was rock bottom and then drif’ off again after a while.

‘My granddaddy liked him. They were both hard-talking, hard-drinking men, ’cept my granddaddy had the religion as well. We all lived in one small shanty, but it was ours. There weren’t no bedrooms or toilets or nothing like that. You saw and heard everything about everyone. No privacy at all, but then children don’t need none.’

Kerry nodded then, remembering the basements. The squalor, the tightly packed bodies in the beds.

‘When I was five, I went to work with my mother at a white lady’s house. She had a man servant called Tobias, a big nigger. More a field hand really, than a lady’s servant, but the woman, Miss Gloria Day ... she was older than him, she was really old, you know. But she weren’t ready to lie down, at least not in the ground anyways. Land’s sakes, I watched her a watchin’ him with that look!’

He laughed and Kerry smiled to hear him. Her eyes were boring into his face.