He’d seen them before in the small scattered towns of the deep north where chance or circumstance had washed them up and left them and so the second afternoon in Randolph he knew more about Leah than she could guess when he looked upon the small crowd as he faced them, hoisting the weights more slowly than he needed to, and saw the tea-skinned woman flanked one side by a beautiful girl of eighteen or twenty and the other by another beautiful child, a small boy of five or so. He knew she’d married a white man most likely during or just after the war and come home with him. He knew it was probable that he was the first Negro she’d seen in a long while, if not since leaving wherever it was she came from. By her dress and manner he knew her as a well-off countrywoman who held herself at a remove from most of the whites around her. He was reasonably sure her husband was not among the crowd and wondered if he’d been at the fights the night before and guessed he’d not. With his eyes vacant and unfocused he watched her as he bent the rod and saw the satisfaction come over her face, as if they’d done the job together. He knew she would seek him afterward to speak.

Outside the back of the closed humidity of the tent where the light was rose-infused, the afternoon was bright late summer, hot, pellucid. He drank from ice water and without swabbing the oil from his body stepped into the red silk pantaloons he wore between appearances but left his chest and feet bare. His job now for twenty minutes was not to mingle but be seen. Long since he’d lost fear of being attacked in daylight by a man defeated the night before. The time or so it had happened his response had been rapid and effective and he knew he was better not thinking about it. He enjoyed these brief saunters through the crowds, his great bulbous head rising above those around him and the space that didn’t generate from him but the white countrypeople who surrounded him. In its way this was when he was most free. Both his upper front teeth were gold and he enjoyed baring them in a soft almost kissing smile to any who’d meet his eye. He enjoyed the confusion this smile would create. He was forty-two years old and had eight thousand dollars in a bank in Brooklyn and wired more each week. He wanted ten more and already knew the building he’d buy with a good hardware store on the first floor and living quarters above. He needed to own it outright and the rest of this season and all of the next would do that. He knew always there was a risk in what he did, the risk of being cut or shot, but believed this would not happen for no good reason other than it would not. He paid great attention to the men he fought and made extreme effort to humiliate none while still delivering what they needed. It did not matter if they understood this or not at the time. He’d learned long ago that understanding almost anything was what happened later on.