He said, “My father died nearly two months ago. My mother and baby sister ten years ago with the influenza. I didn’t know a thing about North Carolina or what went on here until after Father died. He was his own man was all he was, I never knew a thing about his family. Then I went looking. It’s all strange to me. I’m just trying to sort it out. That business you talk about—who’s white and who’s colored and why—it doesn’t make any sense to me. Except it’s starting to. Because my father never talked about his family. But what I don’t know is what does it have to do with me? I guess something because I’m here. All I’m trying to do is figure out what happened to somebody a long time ago. It’s not something that has much to do with who I am. Except maybe to you people. What I think, you people pay too much attention to what doesn’t matter all that much. I’ve got a simple question and your uncle is determined to not give a simple answer. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t have one. Or maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to.”

He had been watching the road. It was like driving with his father, the road tearing out from under them. Daphne had not looked at him as he spoke. When he was done, sometime after that, she lifted and drained the beer and then backhanded the bottle out the window into the night. Still she did not look at him. She was flexed away from the back of the seat, driving fast and peering ahead at once. Then she braked hard and dropped the gears and the car fishtailed and she let it do that, her one hand sliding and then gripping the wheel. As she made the turn off the road onto a shallow dirt track between files of tall pines she said, still not looking at him, “Don’t confuse me with him.”

“You’re the one brought it up.”

“If I hadn’t,” she said, “you’d of had to.”

“You think?”

“I do.” She was quiet then, driving slow down through a stand of woods. She killed the headlights and they were just in moonlight and the columns and shadows of the woods. The pines thinning to hardwoods, big canopied trees still holding their leaves. Then those thinned and he could smell the river before he saw it. An opening that spread out under the reach of the trees and then there was the broad slow drift of the water and the Chrysler came to a stop in the dark. She turned the engine off and twisted sideways on the seat to look at him, one knee poking free of her dress. Pale round bone under the moon. She said, “It’s a strange thing all right. You’re a perfect stranger but you’re not. There’s all that mess back there and if you don’t know it or like it I can’t help that but it’s there.”