“You don’t know nothing about it.”

“I know every goddamn thing I need to know.”

“You don’t know nothing. What you talking bout is niggers. Just niggers. Just some people you don’t know nothing about but think you do. And you too stupid to know what you think’s part of what they is. Just niggers. Niggers like me. Stop your silly schoolgirl friendly with me, girl. I just a nigger too. Just a fat little nigger woman bout to have a child the best way she know how. And nobody, no one, not you, not Norman Pelham, gon’ tell me how to go about that. This my body holding this child, not his, not yours. Most not yours. Just this nigger woman’s.”

“Jesus Leah. Stop it.” Connie hot with it, the heat all through her, burst like sunburn over her face. Shame, pride, anger, some fear, some sickness. Shame.

“No. I ain’t stopping nothing. Choice is simple here. My mind is set like granite. Somebody gon’ ride that horse up the hill around the mountain and fetch her down here to look over me. Only question is, it gon’ be you or it gon’ be me?”

Save for a time or two as a little girl when her father set her up for a brief amble she’d not been horseback in her life. So she led the giant from the barn with the blinkered bridle and makeshift reins, feeling at odds with the job and the strange constricted movement of the heavy belted-up woolen pants. She led him to stand beside the granite block with the iron ring on an eyed rod for hitching, and pushed the horse up against it and went around him to balance atop the block and holding the rope reins tight with handfuls of mane slung herself up the side of the horse, her right leg stretching and catching the broad spread of his back and her arms then pulling her up so that suddenly she slid evenly onto his back. The horse did not move. She pulled up on the rope reins and drummed him with her heels. He did not move. “Shit, you,” she said. She slid her right hand down the rope toward the bit and drew back on it, pulling his head around and slowly he stepped off, following his head. She tapped him again with her heels. As if afraid of getting his hooves wet or slipping on the hardened mud he walked gingerly across the yard toward the uphill trace, responding more to her reining than her heels, his back arched, as if at any moment he would quit this. She pulled him up short and they stood motionless. She thought about quitting it with him but not for long. She said, “Dammit Pete, we got a job to do here. Now get your ass up.” And took the long rope reins tight in one hand and backhanded with the ends to quirt him one shoulder and then the next and raised up her heels for a sharper jab and yelled loud for him to get up. And he went from standing still into a long floating gallop up the hill track, his body rolling forward with great weight as if he’d divined her intent and she somehow kept the reins as she fell forward, stretched along the high curve of his neck, both hands buried deep in his mane, her fists tight-curled into the long hair that raised otherwise to whip her face. Her legs clamped not around but against the great barrel of his sides. Not until they reached the upper leveling of ground and passed the sugarhouse at a slowed canter did she realize that her mouth, only inches from his bright bowed ears, was still pressing him to Go go go.