He meant it as a bitter joke, one he was man enough to laugh at. William chuckled too, but it sounded hollow and sad. Soon, the brothers went back to not speaking, Darren’s home life again emptied of his uncle William’s presence.

In Mr. Page’s kitchen, the old man finished his beer and opened another. For decades, he said, Hopetown had been a self-contained community, with a church and a school, a decent drinking hole with live blues and zydeco on weekends, a general store, and a meeting hall where they held nativity plays and elections. Leroy’s great-great-grandfather had been the town’s first mayor. Every member of the Page family, going back generations, had served on the town council at one point or another, up until the town lost its incorporation back in the late 1970s when black folks started leaving, preferring life in Marshall, Longview, or Dallas—places that offered more for them than a literal backwater in Marion County. Even Jefferson wasn’t enough of a draw; the town’s top industry was tourism, the reselling of an antebellum glory that hadn’t gone all that well for black folks the first time around. There were better jobs, better lives to be had far away from Hopetown. As black families left, one by one, Leroy bought up much of the abandoned land and vowed to stay in the place he considered his birthright, but time ate away at the plan like moths nibbling at boiled wool. To speak of it made his eyes cloud over, made his voice grow wistful and thick with longing. “I was gon’ die here,” he said. He nodded, admiring some picture of the place he held in his mind. “Yes, sir, this here, this little piece of heaven. I was gon’ spend the rest of what God give me right here—fishing, taking care of my horses, growing my collards and peppers.”

“I grow peppers too,” Darren said, the words shooting out with the eager delight of a man meeting a fellow countryman in a foreign place. He looked into the old man’s eyes, which were dark as roasted chicory and set in a face that was long and weathered by time, and he thought he understood the man at once, his connection to the land, to the roots that had raised him up. Mr. Page, too, seemed to regard Darren anew, saw something in him that met his approval. “My people got land too,” Darren said. “Down to San Jacinto County, twelve acres the Mathews family has held on to since not long after Hopetown was founded.”