Skeeter says to Rabbit, “Chuck, I been thinking I sold out the truth last night when I said your slavery was a country thing. The fact upon reflection appears to be that your style of slavery was uniquely and e-specially bad, about the worst indeed this poor blood-soaked globe has ever seen.” Skeeter’s voice as he speaks exerts a steady pressure, wind rattling a dead tree. His eyes never deviate to Nelson or Jill.

Rabbit, a game student (in high school he used to get B’s), asks, “What was so bad about it?”

“Let me guess what you think. You think it wasn’t so bad on the plantations, right? What with banjos and all the fritters you could eat and Ol’ Massah up at the big house instead of the Department of Welfare, right? Those niggers were savages anyway, their chuckleheads pure bone, and if they didn’t like it, well, why didn’t they just up and die in their chains like the noble old redman, right?”

“Yeah. Why didn’t they?”

“I love that question. Because I have the answer. The reason is, old Tonto was so primitive farmwork made no sense to him, he was on the moon, right?, and just withered away. Now the black man, he was from West Africa, where they had agriculture. Where they had social organization. How do you think those slaves got to the coast from a thousand miles away? Black men arranged it, they wouldn’t cut the white men in, they kept the pie all for themselves. Organization men, right?”

“That’s interesting.”

“I’m glad you said that. I am grateful for your interest.”

“He meant it,” Jill intercedes.

“Swallow your tongue,” Skeeter says without looking toward her.

“Swallow your tongue yourself,” Nelson intervenes. Rabbit would be proud of the boy, but he feels that Nelson’s defense of Jill, like Skeeter’s attack, are automatic: parts of a pattern the three have developed while he is away working.

“The readings,” Jill prompts.

Skeeter explains. “Little Jilly and I, today, been talking, and her idea is, to make cosy nights all together more structured, right? We’d read aloud a few things, otherwise I’m apt to do all the talking, that is until you decide to dump me on the floor again.”

“Let me get a beer then.”

“Puts pimples on your belly, man. Let me light up some good Tijuana brass and pass it over, old athlete like you shouldn’t be getting a beer gut, right?”