And that was true enough. For every morning the Crab Lady would stop and talk to Mrs. Quick while she washed down her porch. She would never set the basket on the ground while she talked, but always stood with one hand on her wide hip and the other balancing the basket on her head, talking. And Mrs. Quick would continue to scrub her porch. Thomas and his brother would watch them until their mother came in to make them wash and dress for school. Leaving the window, Thomas would try to get a last look at Mrs. Quick, her head covered by a white bandanna, her old back bent in scrubbing, still talking to the Crab Lady. He would wonder what they talked about every morning. Not knowing this bothered him and he began to imagine their morning conversations. Mrs. Quick was West Indian and knew all about roots and voodoo, and Thomas was very afraid of her. He suspected that they talked about voodoo and who in the neighborhood had been fixed. Roots were like voodoo, and knowing about them made Mrs. Quick something to be feared. Thomas thought that she must know everything about him and everyone in the world, because once he and Edward and Luke, a fat boy who worked in the fish market around the corner, had put some salt and pepper and brown sand in a small tobacco pouch, and had thrown it on her white-wood porch, next to the screen door. They had done it as a joke and had run away afterwards, into an alley between his house and the funeral parlor across the street, and waited for her to come out and discover the pouch. They had waited for almost fifteen minutes and still she did not come out; and after all that time waiting it was not such a good joke any more and so they had gone off to the graveyard to gather green berries for their slingshots. But the next morning, on his way to school, Mrs. Quick had looked up from scrubbing her porch and called him over, across the dirt street.

“You better watch yourself, boy,” she had said. “You hear me?”

“Why?” Thomas had asked, very frightened and eager to be running away to join his brother, who was still walking in the wet spring morning, still safe and on his way to school.

Mrs. Quick had looked at him, very intensely. Her face was very black and wrinkled and her hair was white where it was not covered by the white bandanna. Her mouth was small and tight and deliberate and her eyes were dark and red where they should have been white. “You left-handed, ain’t you?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Then watch yourself. Watch yourself good, ’less you get fixed.”

“I ain’t done nothin’,” he said. But he knew that she was aware that he was lying.

“You left-handed, ain’t you?”

He nodded.