“I’ve got a prescription. Look at this. It’s called Dexedrine. I’ve got black ones and black-and-white ones. Which one do you want?” She reached into a pocket of the shorts she had on underneath the kimono and produced two bottles. “You can have some if you want them. I can get all I want. You want one now? You stay awake all night if you take them.”

“Let me see.” I took the bottles from her and looked at them. They didn’t look like the pills I had taken that summer. Still, it might be the same thing. “I might take one. Which one’s the best?”

“The black ones last longer. Take a black-and-white. Here.” She opened the bottle and handed me a pill. I walked into the kitchen and got a glass of water and swallowed it.

“Let’s have a drink,” Charles William said. “I’ve got some fabulous scotch whiskey.”

Three hours later we were still drinking scotch and talking. “I want to go to the Continental Club and dance with the band,” May Garth kept saying. “Rhoda has to see it. Just you wait, Rhoda. You never heard music like this in your whole life.”

“I used to love a saxophone player,” I kept answering. “I still love him. I should never have married Malcolm. If Malcolm calls, tell him I’m not here. I’m never going back. All he does is yell at me. He thinks I am his slave.”

An hour later I was dancing with a black musician in a black nightclub. We had been given a table on the edge of the dance floor. Black men in tuxedos came by the table and spoke to May Garth and held her hand. It was very powerful and strange in the room. It was the closest I would ever come to a revolution. I was in the center of the power base of black power in the American South but I was too drunk and high to register anything but fleeting images. Lights on the bandstand, a sweet pink drink in a tall glass, Charles William standing by the table laughing and joking with the men in tuxedos, elegantly dressed black women who never spoke to us, the small black man who led me out onto the dance floor and tried to dance with me. I could almost follow him but not quite. Every time I thought I had figured out what we were doing the step would change.

Later I was lying on a sofa in the manager’s office and May Garth was fanning me. Later still I was in a car being driven to the “grotto.” Then I was sleeping in a soft clean bed with sheets that felt like the ones at my mother’s house.