“Well, not now. Go back to bed. You’re going to wake up Jimmy. Leave me alone, Mother. Get out of here.” She stood at the foot of the bed, staring at me, trying to make me talk, but she had never had an ounce of power over me and she sure wasn’t going to have any now. If it was up to her I would die having babies for her goddamn God. “Get out of here,” I repeated. “Leave me alone. Let me sleep.” She shook her head and moved toward the door. She left the room and I cuddled down again over Jimmy. I had been inside her body. Once I had been curled up inside her as Jimmy and Malcolm had been curled up inside of me. And something else, some terrible homunculus sent to kill me, but I had gotten rid of it. I had flown to Houston, Texas, and had it cut out of my womb. I had done it. I had saved my life and I didn’t care what any of them thought or any of them did. I was going to live and be happy. I would find a way to have a happy life. Wherever there was such a thing. It was out there somewhere and I would go and find it. I rolled my head down into the fine clean ironed sheets on my little four-poster cherry bed. I moved my body around my child until we were one fine breathing thing and then I slept. In my dreams I was somewhere in New York City talking to people who thought like me and laughed like me and knew the world was funny. We raised our glasses high. It was Dorothy Parker. She was across the table from me. “I want you to meet an atheist, Rhoda,” she was saying. “I heard you wanted to meet some atheists and some poets.”

I woke at dawn and went downstairs and found Daddy at the dining room table with his newspaper and his poached egg. Fannin’s cousin, Mayberry, was in the kitchen cooking. Daddy had searched all over Dunleith to find a breakfast cook who would come in as early as he got up and had finally found one. He and Mayberry were “what and what,” as he was fond of saying. Meaning they were both highly suspicious, profoundly cynical, and almost never slept. Mayberry lived alone in a small frame house, had never married, and was probably as much Scots as my father. She was so light-skinned she thought she was above the other black people. While she cooked Daddy’s poached eggs in the mornings, he called the news from the papers into the kitchen. Sometimes he got so excited he got up and went to stand beside her to read her the latest political chicanery. “Those sapsuckers are heading us into another foreign war, Mayberry. They’re all fools. Nothing but fools.”