Those old eyes slid over Foster, crackling bright, sly and flared at once. “My sister. Is that right? You’re telling me that my daddy, that he laid down with a Negro woman? That he not only laid down with one but had get? My daddy? My old daddy dead these long years and not here to deny or laugh at such a tale. That’s what you come all this way to tell me? That a man had a colored woman in his own house and that he screwed her? Why boy, get in that car of yours and drive around. Every two-three pitchblack faces you see you’ll see at least one watered-down coffee-colored Negro. What you think made them that way? Laundry bleach? They’re not related to anyone but their ownselves, their own kind. Black has all tones, low and high, but there is only one white and make no mistake about that.”

“What about me?”

“What about you?”

“What am I?”

“A Yankee is what you sound like. Other than that, right watered down, I’d say. But listen here.”

“What?”

“Who knows where you are?”

“Nobody. My aunts, I guess. My father’s sisters.”

The old man nodded as if making a point. “And where is it you plan to stay?”

“I don’t know. There’s a hotel I guess.”

Mebane nodded. “All I have to do is step back inside and make a telephone call and you wouldn’t have a place to stay. All I’d have to say is you’re a colored trying to pass as white and you wouldn’t have a room. Or, I make one other call and there’s the law to escort you out of town while they offer up a little lecture about disturbing the peace. You following me all the way through this?”

“I guess I am.”

“It’s a problem though. If you were to go over into Fishtown where all the coloreds live, there wouldn’t be a one would want to talk to you. You wouldn’t find a place to stay over there either. In fact, you poked around enough, made enough people nervous, they’d do you as fine as our sheriff’s men would. Maybe finer. I don’t know what it is about Negroes but they like a knife. Maybe because it doesn’t make any noise. Not like a pistol which would tend to draw attention. But those people, all they’d see is a strange white boy who talks funny and is poking his nose in their business. And it wouldn’t even be you so much they fear as what you might bring with you, what might be traveling behind you, what you might not even know you’d be bringing with you. Because life over there works in different ways than you’ve ever seen life work And so you wouldn’t even know who was watching you and what they might think about you. But those people, those colored people, they’d know.”