The room grew so silent and stayed that way for so long that Darren could actually hear the lake behind the house, the music of warblers and the sound of wood storks nesting and braying up high in a cypress tree somewhere. Finally, Margaret spoke with the same firm knowingness with which she had told her people to trust Darren. “Leroy will protect us,” she said. And when Darren asked how, he counted a good twenty seconds before she said, “It’s all being taken care of.”

“May I ask how your people ended up here?” Darren said.

“Leroy’s ancestors invited our ancestors to Hopetown near the turn of the last century,” she said, the lines around her eyes crinkling warmly as she played some picture in her mind, Caddos and blacks living side by side. “We’re family.”

“I meant how did your people end up here in Texas?” Darren said.

Margaret gave Darren a sly look as she reached into the pocket of her dress for a pipe and a packet of tobacco. Sadie or Saku took the baby from the room rather than telling her mother she couldn’t smoke in her own house. Margaret watched Darren as she packed her tobacco. “So they give you this badge with no history, is that it?” She lit the pipe with a kitchen match; the burning tobacco smelled faintly of cherries. “Texas is our ancestral home,” she said with a careful patience that embarrassed Darren. He sounded as much a fool as the white folks who asked the Mathews family where they were from from. I know Texas, but before that— A question to which Darren’s uncle Clayton would offer caustically, “We grew ourselves whole here, passed one set of ribs around a cotton field until we had made a tribe of black Texans called Mathews. Before Texas, we were dust.”

Darren hadn’t meant to sound ignorant about state history and forced migration; he’d only been trying to put the Goodfellows within the political context of most Texas Indians, who’d been pushed out of the state in the middle of the nineteenth century. “I thought most of the Caddos settled in Oklahoma. On a reservation there, yes?” He looked at Margaret, who smiled faintly, puffing on her pipe.

“My family has never seen Oklahoma,” she said.