“My fiancée and a very brave journalist did a lot of work to try to punish the men who committed these crimes, Mrs. Booker. They died for it. And a young woman was hurt the other day for trying to carry on their work.”

“I believe I heard about that, yessir.”

“Will you look at these pictures? I know you’re afraid, and you’ve had reason to be afraid for a long time. But things are finally changing, Mrs. Booker. Several of these men are dead already. I killed one myself, though I can’t say that outside this room. Maybe the worst one.”

At last she turns to look at me, piercing brown eyes set in sclera so yellow they look jaundiced. “God bless you, child.”

“But that man’s uncle is still alive. He’s still hurting people like that young reporter.”

The old woman closes her eyes, then gently pushes the calico off her lap and fixes me with an unsettling stare.

“I know things are changing,” she says. “But they don’t change everywhere at the same speed. Down here time moves on a different clock. Down here it’s still forty years ago, in some ways. Back then, I knew if I told those FBI men something, and they started questioning people around here—or up at Natchez, or across the river at Ferriday—word would get out that somebody had talked. And sooner or later, those devils would come back around here. The FBI men always promised protection, but they couldn’t protect anybody. They weren’t gonna move into this house with Dee and me. And Lem was already dead when all this happened. If we’d told anything, we’d have died within a month. And nobody would have made a fuss, either. In white folks’ minds, Sam and Dee had upset the natural order of things, and they got what they deserved.”

I remember my father telling me how his fear of retaliation kept him from telling the FBI things he’d known about the Double Eagles. If a white physician couldn’t summon the courage to talk to the FBI, how could anyone expect a poor black woman to do it?

“What happened to Dolores?” Serenity asks. “Did she go back north after that happened?”