Still, I had her house and I had her friends, Charles William and Irise. Charles William was my first true running buddy, my first imaginative peer. All my life I had wanted a friend who knew what I was talking about. I had angelized plenty of people, one in each town where I lived, endowed them with whatever it was I needed, then overwhelmed them and made them love me, but I had never before found anyone who didn’t need any filling in. Charles William was with me all the way. Of course, when two people like us get together there is always a chance things will get out of hand. We had Irise for an occasional voice of reason, but she was too polite to really put a brake on us. If we started doing something she didn’t like (such as wearing the ankhs to early communion), she just said she wanted to stay home. Which is why she wasn’t with us the night we went to meet the Klan.

“Y’all go on,” she said. “I’ll see you when you get back.”

It started out innocently enough. It was about six weeks after I moved to town and Charles William asked me if I wanted to go and see a cockfight.

“Sure,” I said. “Whyyy not.”

“It’s in a field they use for Klan meetings. I’ve been wanting to go and watch. If something like that’s going on, you ought to go and see it.”

“That’s great. I’d like to see it. I read about it but I don’t know what they do.” I didn’t know what they did. I had not lived in the Deep South since I was a child. Everything I knew about the Klan I had read in Gone With the Wind. I thought their job was to keep black men from raping me. I didn’t even know about the hangings.