“Lester was the first trailer, the only one till this summer. He moved out here after his wife died down in Marshall, set up that little trailer and kept to himself. He was an old redneck, sure he was. Got drunk and fished most days of his life. But him being without his wife, I cut him a lot of slack. My girls and I lost their mother early, so I knowed him, kind of. Now, Lester could talk mean, about the loud, dirty colored folk in town, had a little ol’ dixie flag on the antenna of his El Camino. But he treated me decent, always paid his rent on time, and on occasion me and him got to talking. He and I served in the army around the same time, come to find out. Neither of us saw combat and had feelings about what we might have missed, how guns and Europe might have changed us. Would we have come back home if we’d seen Paris or Rome? I was sure I would’ve. Lester wasn’t. We learned we’d actually been stationed at the same base in Louisiana, me in the colored barracks and him with the white boys. I guess you could say we got to be something like friends, drinking together on my porch out there, listening to Karnack High School ball games on the radio. I liked him, I did. I was willing to forgive the stuff he’d said when we met, what I took as his ignorance, having spent no real time with black folks. I was willing to lay down all the history didn’t neither one of us ask for and just meet him man to man. I reached out a hand to him and look what it done me.”

“What about Marnie King?”

“That’s when the trouble started. She moved in when her husband went away to prison. He’s a skinhead, something like that, and I guess with him locked up, she ain’t have no place to go, and her daddy took her in, her and them kids. Levi was still in diapers. Then she took up with the one staying out there now, and his cracker friends started coming around. Started calling me nigger on my own land. I told Lester I wouldn’t have it, told him to get his girl under control. Lester seemed overwhelmed by the changes, five of them now living in that trailer, his daughter slinking from one crooked racist to another, and I don’t know, but about three months ago, his heart give out. The old man wasn’t buried a week before Gil started sub-renting out the acres I let to Lester. And before you know it, it’s more trailers and folks living out of vans, more coming in week after week. Like a whole cancer of hate is spreading out across Hopetown, my home.”