“Negro, Liliane, Negro. We don’t have to say colored anymore.” Sometimes for such a modern girl Liliane was caught in a mess of old-timey ways. “Negro is the word to use today, my papa insists on it. Less you want to do some very tedious chores, don’t say that other appellation for our folks around here.”

“Roxie, do you ever talk anything besides ‘the War’ and the race? Do you? There’s so much more to life than what white folks have to do with. We can’t spend our whole lives worrying ourselves about what they’re going to do, what they think of us, or where they are hiding, for that matter.”

“You can say that. Ku Kluxers aren’t just around the bend from you.”

“You know that for a fact, do you?” Liliane smiled at me the kind of smile I’d been taught accompanies a demure reply when a young man asks for a dance.

“Why, Liliane. You are fit on frustrating me this very moment, heifer.”

We laughed and lay back on the rocks. The sand was so fine I sometimes thought it was more like another skin, hot and supple. I wondered did Liliane notice how peculiar and awkward people looked trying to walk on sand, sinking and stumbling, disrupting patterns in continuous motion, sacred doodles of the breeze, I thought. The sea was flirtatious that day, too. No signs of trouble, no torn tree limbs or perplexing bones. I saw my words on their way to Cuba, to fighters with Maceo, to the hands of Placido writing so long ago. Liliane thought I was parochial. That’s what she called my “race” talk, but I’d been talking to the black black bones of dead slaves and freedmen since I was a child. My mama says I’m still a child. Shucks, she probably thinks Tallulah is a child. I can’t find a way yet to tell anyone that I’m not a girl interested in the way things are or used to be. I am dreaming of what we’ll be that’s different, that’ll set us aside, a generation that confounds white folks. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to marry well.

“Liliane, don’t you think it’s amazing that your mama married well and doesn’t go to meetings or balls or things? How do you think she managed that? Not coming to the Negro affairs with your daddy, I mean.”

“You’ll have to ask her,” Liliane responded, handing me the cocoa butter for her back.

“You can use this on stretch marks, my mama says. That way your husband will stay nigh.”

“Roxie, Negro women don’t get stretch marks.”

“You only say that because your mama is so young and pretty. I got a mama who is a Negro woman with stretch marks, so don’t you tell me. I know what I’m talking about.”