“There’s been three hundred years of colored people owned by white people. There’s very few white boys that did not start out their manhood with a black girl. And there was some that would continue right on all their lives, without regard of their own wives and children. Some of those did it because they could. Because it was there and could not say no. Some kept on because it was a reach into some other life, something wild and unfettered missing in their own lives, regardless of how fettered it might be on the other end. And there was some, some few, who did it because they could not stop themselves, because their hearts bolted away from them. And the ones who did not, who left the colored women be after that first initiation or maybe even did not partake of that, they came down into two groups also. There was the ones who understood pure and simple that it was wrong. And there was the others who did not understand that but knew it was true. Do you understand the difference? To not do something because it’s wrong and not do the same thing because everyone else thinks it’s wrong?

“I do.” Foster, back on his heels, his legs asleep from his knees down, unable to move, his eyes on the face of the man seated above him.

Mebane said, “Coleman Mebane was one of those ones with the bolted heart. And his son, his heir, Buchanan, knew that about his father and hated him for it. I don’t have to tell you he was one who held himself above it all. Or if he had to rut on some girl you could bet it was a girl off in some corner hid well from everybody else. But there he stood. With that eight hundred dollars in his hand. And knowing his father and his brother were men from the same piece of work. With that softness of heart he so despised. You see, it was not like some men that would spread it around. Grandfather Coleman had just the one woman in her own little cabin down the end of the row of cabins and each one of those babies the same dun color as the next, not a one with a father different from the next.