“I ought to adopt those children,” Daddy kept saying. “You ought to let your mother and me adopt them, Sweetie. If anything happened to you, those sapsuckers up in Georgia could come down here and take those little boys away and raise them any way they liked.”

“Oh, Daddy.” I was shocked by the ferocity of the idea. He was always doing that, cutting right to the heart of the matter, coming out of nowhere to say what no one else would say.

“They’re Mannings,” he went on. “And it looks like Dudley’s never going to have a boy. We ought to adopt them and change their names to Manning. That little husband of yours doesn’t care anything about any of you.”

“I couldn’t let you do that. I couldn’t do that to Malcolm.”

“Well, you go on and have a good time with your friends. I’m sorry it didn’t work out about business school but we’ll think of something for you to do. Maybe you can go up to Florence to that branch of the university next year. You could stay up there with my cousin, Ellen Moore, and come home on the weekends.”

“I might. I need to do something.”

“Well, go round up the boys and we’ll take them out to Finley Island to see the goats. I’m going to have them a little goat cart made. It’s time for them to start learning to control animals.” We rounded up the babies and the maids and piled into Daddy’s car and went out to the river to see the goats. “We’ll get them a pony next year,” he said. “By next year they ought to be big enough to ride. I swear, that Little Malcolm’s a wild one. He’s the strongest little boy I’ve ever seen.” Then he would sweep my children up into his arms and laugh with delight. He had forgotten they were mine. He thought they belonged to him.

In the world outside, momentous things continued to go on. The public schools of Memphis, Atlanta, and Dallas desegregated in the fall. White people were building their academies, sending money to the Klan, joining the White Citizens’ Council, digging in. The part of my father that did these things and bragged on doing them was his Achilles’ heel. It would keep him from greatness and in the end would take away the riches he had been so proud of making. EVERY DAY THE WORLD TURNS UPSIDE DOWN ON SOMEONE WHO THOUGHT HE WAS SITTING ON TOP OF IT was a saying he had pinned to his dresser mirror. It should have said, HE WHO HATES IS LOST.