The man ignored her and squatted, still not down to the boy’s level but close. He said, “Jamie. You’re mighty high-yellow yourself.”

The boy pulled back against his mother, frightened, the words meaning nothing to him, not reassured by the kind tone. The man went on.

“You’re just a little boy. Plenty people think, Little boy like that, he don’t know when he’s wronging somebody. They let it slide on by. They think he don’t know no better. But he does. He thinks, I got away with it once, I can again. Maybe so. But someday, somewhere, be someone won’t let you get away with it. And you’ll be thinking, I got away with it all that time, why this person get so upset now? And you’ll be thinking, Must be his fault not mine. But you’ll be wrong.” And reached out before the boy could shrink further and took his small shoulder in his hand and gave it a gentle squeeze just strong enough so the boy understood the message if not the words. Felt the boy quail before the touch and then push into it. And stood and addressed the mother, speaking to stop her apology before he was even all the way up. “That sounded like a lecture ma’am. Didn’t mean it to. Just trying to warn him off.”

Her features were alight. On a white woman would be a blush. “He knows better.”

He nodded, grave. “I’m sure he does.” Then, again without waiting for her, he stuck out his hand. He felt like a caretaker. “Name’s Ben. Unless you want to call me African Behemoth.” Grinned at her with the absurdity of this. Now more glad than before that the daughter wasn’t there. Wanted nothing before him to diminish or compare this woman to.

She took his hand, her own as strong and calloused as he expected. She said, “I’m Leah Pelham.”

“Missus Pelham.” He dropped her hand. “Picked a pretty day to come out see the show.” He waved his hand as if indicating not only the surrounding fairgrounds—the livestock tents and permanent exhibition buildings, the small neat grandstand above the harness-racing oval and the clawed field of the ox-pull, the thrum of the afternoon crowd, the smell of food fried or sugared or both, the giddy quaver of children’s voices set free, the cries of stock and fowl from the tents—all this but also the day itself, his hand rising to include the sweep of sky, the dry hot air of late summer. As if it were all that and not himself she’d come to see. As if he were ancillary, even merely an accident.