“I don’t know. I felt like there was something wrong inside of Mama. She had some kind of hate for Daddy that I didn’t understand. I thought it was her hate that had cursed us, somehow.”

“How did Jelks react when you told him you couldn’t get money for an attorney?”

“He went crazy. He was facing fifteen years of hard time.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He told me I was useless. A waste of good air. Then he said that didn’t surprise him, ’cause I wasn’t no son of his anyway.”

“How did you react to that?”

“I thought he was kidding. But then something happened to his face, and I knew he wasn’t. It was like the mask came off. The last one. He’d worn masks all his life, conning people. He was a master of disguise, never showing who he really was. But that day I saw the real Junius Jelks. And there was nothing in his eyes but anger, fear, and hatred.”

“Did you ask him who your real father was?”

Lincoln nods.

Judge Elder says, “Please give a verbal response.”

Lincoln looks up at the judge. “Is it all right to use profanity?”

“You can repeat what he told you.”

“He told me that Mama had been raped by a bunch of Ku Klux Klansmen back in Mississippi. He said one of those cracker bastards was my father.”

“Oh, Lord,” cries an older black woman from behind me, and a dozen other people join her.

“Junius said he’d lied to me all those years because Mama wanted him to, but he was done with her now, and me, too. He didn’t want me thinking he was my daddy anymore. He said it made him sick to look at me. Every time he looked at me, he saw some dirty-ass klukker. Said he always had.”

Murmurs of sympathy and condemnation rise in volume behind me.

“Did you believe what he’d told you?” Shad asks.

“Not at first.”

“Why not?”

“Well . . . because I don’t look white. Or even half white.”

“Did you ask your mother about the Klan story?”

“Yes. She denied it. She told me that the rape had happened, but that none of those men were my father. She said my father was a man she’d met when she first got to Chicago.”

“Did you believe her?”

“I wasn’t sure. I wanted to believe her. I asked if he was white or black. She said black. She said he’d been a married man, but he was dead by then, so there was no use telling me his name.”

“Did you believe her?”

“I believed her about the Klan part. But I didn’t believe my real father was dead, whoever he was. I sensed she was lying to me. To protect me, maybe, but lying all the same.”

“How did you sense it?”