Back, then, and back to what. It was not a childhood longed for. But her mother first. Her mother surely. It seemed plausible Helen would be right there, if not in the rank squalor of Mebane’s slave cabin then somewhere close by. A colored section of the town. Some small simple place of her own. No longer a young woman but maybe to have gained a husband and even a family of her own. Leah knew it possible her sudden arrival might bring pain, the past made vivid. So be it if it came to that. For all of them. Also as likely, there might be no trace of her. All Leah knew for sure was one way of living had been swept off and in that sweeping surely people fled, went off wordless into the night as she had. Her mother perhaps among them and perhaps even to well and good. And knew too it was more than Helen; wanted also to see what had happened to the town, to the place itself, to the white people. Wanted to see the Mebane house still four-square or broken to rubble as the cellar-hole just passed. Not even sure she knew which would satisfy her. And beyond all that, less precise and yet also in an odd intangible way, of considerable and terrible weight, wanting to know again something of the place she came out of: Beyond the people, otherwise from circumstance, to regain the place and so give form to the vague imagery of dreams. Be September and still hot, pale skim of redclay dust over everything, dulling even the leaves on the trees, the big oaks of the Piedmont pastures and the live oaks and magnolias of town streets all dulled with dust, only the loblollies and white pines shedding it but their needles still pale in the heat-shimmer. Lawns burned back. The midday breeze hot moving hot, the evening air stilled, the sun grown huge, the color of split peach as it dropped to the horizon smudge. September, she thought. People working in the tobacco fields at dawn, figures of clothing in the green waist-high fields with morning mist already burning away from the grinding sun. Children back to school, the streets empty even first thing in the morning. A good time to come in quiet and quiet as she could learn what there was to be learned. The span of summer lengthened out before the fall with people slowed almost without hope for the first cool day. Nobody even likely to pay attention to one strange colored woman off the train. What she hoped for. The advantage of being unexpected. Surprise.