Darren didn’t have an easy answer, but the question touched him. He knew Greg’s heart even if he thought his ambition might be clouding his view of the situation out in Hopetown, just as Greg thought Darren’s compulsive sense of familial duty to every black person he came across—and particularly those over the age of sixty-five—had blinded his judgment of Leroy Page. Even without knowing about Mack and the case hanging over Darren’s head back in San Jacinto County, Greg could feel his friend’s distress over even the possibility that Page was involved in whatever happened to Levi King. The two men knew each other like brothers. Could they still love each other through whatever came next in Marion County? When the hug fell flat, Greg held out a fist and Darren tapped it with his. Greg smiled and said, “I’m happy about you and Lisa, man.”

So not only had Greg and Lisa run into each other at the courthouse, they’d spent enough time together to get into Darren’s drinking and the state of his marriage.

Outside the hotel, Clyde, Rosemary King’s driver, was leaning against the driver’s-side door of her silver Cadillac, waiting. Darren checked his watch, wondering if Rosemary’s dinner party had finally broken up or if Clyde had been sent to fetch one of her guests. Either way, he was happy to catch the man alone. He’d spoken to so few black folks in Jefferson proper that he had no sense of what all they knew of Hopetown, what the old slave settlement meant to them. “Lot of folks think they all gone by now,” Clyde said when Darren asked.

Through the cracked window of the car, Darren heard a husky, swinging blues, music Clyde played when no one else was around. I believe my soul’s found a happy home. Ruthie Foster. Darren knew the tune, knew she’d once recorded with Jessie Mae Hemphill. The music reminded Darren of being in Mr. Page’s kitchen this afternoon, called to mind the second verse of the hymn Jessie Mae was singing then, lyrics he’d never heard in any other version. I make heaven my home, I shall not be moved. Black music, Darren thought, so often points hearts and minds to a higher plane. The musicians know that faith is more important than terra firma, that it has to be, for the material world is full of trials and tribulations, transgressions against body and soul, against our right to any piece of this country, its fields and prairies that we once tilled until our backs broke and bled.