“What’s to eat?”

She didn’t look up, her arm still moving. “Same as always. Field peas, turnips, collards, some cornbread. All of it cold though.”

“Colored food.”

She shrugged, still not looking at him. “It’s what they is. You want better you should’ve gone off with the rest of them.”

“Yes,” he said. “I spect they’re eating oysters and champagne. Beefsteak maybe.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “All I know is what’s here.”

His fingers drummed hard and fast on the tabletop, then stopped. “Get me something to eat.”

“I’m working.”

“You already ironed that thing three times.”

She stayed quiet.

He said, “Get me some dinner.”

“I’m busy. You feed yourself.”

“Look at me.”

“I done looked at you. You still able to feed yourself, I can see.”

He slapped his hand on the table hard. “Goddammit, I said look at me.”

She stepped away to the stove and placed the cold iron on it and brought a hot one back and set it on the end of the board. She took up the shirt and folded it and placed it on the pile and dipped to lift another from the basket and laid it over the board. Then she looked at him and said, “What you want, Mister Lex?”

A shroud of darkness ran over his boy’s face, not strong enough to break the softness of his skin but something laced through the muscles beneath the surface, a tautness there; and for the first time she feared him. This fear angered her and so angry at the manchild before her she only said again, “What you want, Mister Lex?” This time the title over her tongue the juice of a bitter weed.

“You know what Mama told me before they all lit out for Raleigh?”

She said nothing. His eyes dark, wet.

“She told me there was nobody but myself to blame. I said I was just trying to do my part. She told me I was a fool, my part wasn’t anything I thought it was, nobody’s part was what they thought it was anymore. She said we all had new parts coming and not one of us could know what they was. But we could be smart enough to figure out to wait until they was revealed. And me sitting there like this and her telling me that. Like she was angry at me. Like she somehow blamed me. Like she blamed me for the future somehow.”

Leah said, “She a tough woman,” and didn’t know she knew this until she said it.

His eyes shot from her face as if she’d said nothing. He said, “It was mostly old men and boys like me. What men there was was worn out. Cold like you never known. Grown men barefoot in the wintertime. When the fight come each one lit up with a rage. Men furious wild with right. One minute you’re red as bears’ eyes and the next you’re flat on the ground with the world all gone to pain and men climbing over you running and you thinking about your daddy sitting on his fat ass down there and knowing it’s men like him that keep this thing going at the same time you know somehow it’s men like him keep it from working. My arm wasn’t nothing next to that. It made me sit up and puke. It still makes me want to puke.”