Then May Garth sent me a book of poetry by Langston Hughes. “Oh, shining tree! Oh, shining rivers of the soul.” I kept the books in the bedside table where I hid journals and the copy of One Arm and Other Stories Charles William had given me the summer we met. In that little cherry bedside table were all the secrets my culture meant to keep from me, everything they feared and wanted me to fear. I did fear the books in that table but I could not keep from reading them and I did not throw them away.

Meanwhile, Malcolm had gotten his degree in engineering and was working in a small milling town in South Carolina. He did not call me and after I called him drunkenly several times in the middle of the night he got an unlisted phone number. “My sons are virgin births,” I had started telling people. After a while I began to believe it.

“I’ll build Sister an apartment in the side yard,” Daddy had said, as soon as he got us back again. “I’ve already called the builders. We ought to adopt those babies, Ariane. They’re Mannings, Manning boys. We ought to change their names.”

“Don’t encourage her,” my mother answered. “Don’t encourage her to leave her husband.”

“To hell with the little bastard,” Daddy said. “I never did like the little son-of-a-bitch anyway.” It was all he said now if anyone mentioned Malcolm’s name.

So the carpenters had appeared and built a room onto the side of Momma’s house and Daddy hired two more maids. “Sister can go back to school,” he decreed. “She can go to business school and learn about the markets.” I dutifully signed up for business school and went out and bought a wardrobe of businesslike dresses and even went to the classes for a week or two. I went until they had a spelling bee. One morning I found myself standing with my back against a blackboard spelling simple words in competition with a dour-looking man in a short-sleeved shirt. I lost on some simple word, picked up my pocketbook, and walked home in a rage. What in the name of God was I doing in a business school? I stopped a block from my mother’s house and sat down on a low stone wall and wept like a child. I couldn’t even win a spelling bee at a goddamn business school. It was clear my mind was gone, my life was over.

Meanwhile, Daddy’s lawyers were getting me a divorce and custody of my children in exchange for Malcolm not having to pay me any child support. He had agreed to the proposition but he had not signed the papers yet.