“I believe so. They started beating on Sam, kickin’ him, and callin’ him all kinds of names. Crazy religious names, Dee said. Some of it she didn’t even understand. Lord, they were filled with hate. One was howling scripture during all this.”

“What did they want from Sam?”

“Want? Vengeance, baby. They said he’d married a white woman, and there was only one penalty for that crime. Death. Mis-ce-genation, they called it. I looked it up in the big dictionary at the church. Race-mixing is what it means. They said Sam was guilty of defiling a white woman, and he couldn’t be bringing no mud babies into the world. Mud babies. Which is just pitiful, when you think how many white men fathered babies on black women. Probably some of those very men doing the beating.”

“You know they did,” Serenity whispers. “What happened next?”

“When Dolores realized why they was beating Sam, she started screaming then that she wasn’t white. She told ’em her daddy was as black as Sam, and she hadn’t ever pretended to be white. But it didn’t do no good. They didn’t believe her, see?”

The old woman shakes her head, then raises one hand to wipe her eyes. “Dee realized then that they meant to kill Sam. And she was right. Somebody got a rope out the boat and slung it over a limb. Sam was only half-conscious by then, thank Jesus. Dee begged and pleaded, ‘Why do you have to kill him?’ she kept asking. Finally, one of them turned to her and said, ‘Because he’s a nigger. And he defiled your womanhood, you whore.’”

“Jesus,” I breathe, barely able to believe this happened less than forty miles from my childhood home.

“You know what Dee did then?” Mrs. Booker asks.

“Tell me,” Serenity whispers.

“She broke loose and threw herself down over Sam to protect him. They started beating her, but when they stopped to catch their breath, she said, ‘He hasn’t broken your law! Can’t you see what’s right in front of you? I’m a nigger, too, you damn fools! I’m a nigger, too!’”

Neither I nor Serenity speaks while the old woman takes a Kleenex from the table beside her and dabs her watery eyes. Then at length Serenity says, “Dolores told you all this?”

“When she got to where she could talk straight, she did. It took most of a day to get her in her right mind.”

“How did she get away from them?”

“They dropped her about a mile from my house when they was done with her.”

I close my eyes, wanting not to ask, but I know Serenity won’t let it go any more than Caitlin would have. “What else did they do to her?”