“No sir. I never had the chance to do that.”

“Still, you chased off halfway down the country after something what might have happened almost sixty-five years ago. Why’d you do that? What is it you think you might find? Other than a single old one-armed man?”

“She came back here. Came back down twenty-five years after she left. Came back to try and find the mother she’d left behind. Or find out what happened to her. It would’ve been September of 1890.”

“That was still a long time ago.”

“I think she saw you that time. When she came back.”

“What in the world makes you think a thing like that? You think I keep track of every vagrant Negro that passes through this town? Why boy, on any given day they come and go at numbers I couldn’t even guess at. If I wanted to. And why would I want to?”

“She was your sister. Your half sister.”

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.”