“O.K.,” Skeeter says. “Now here’s how. You is a big black man sittin’ right there. You is chained to that chair. And I, I is white as snow. Be-hold.” And Skeeter, with that electric scuttling suddenness, stands, and pulls off his shirt. In the room’s deep dusk his upper half disappears. Then he scrabbles at himself at belt-level and his lower half disappears. Only his glasses remain, silver circles. His voice, disembodied, is the darkness. Slowly his head, a round cloud, tells against the blue light from the streetlamp at the end of the Crescent. “And this little girl here,” he calls, “is black as coal. An ebony virgin torn from the valley of the river Niger, right? Stand up, honey, show us your teeth. Turn clean around.” The black shadows of his hands glide into the white blur Jill is, and guide it upward, as a potter guides a lump of clay upward on the humming wheel, into a vase. She keeps rising, smoke from the vase. Her dress is being lifted over her head. “Turn around, honey, show us your rump.” A soft slap gilds the darkness, the whiteness revolves. Rabbit’s eyes, enlarged, can sift out shades of light and dark, can begin to model the bodies six feet from him, across the cobbler’s bench. He can see the dark crack between Jill’s buttocks, the faint dent her hip muscle makes, the shadowy mane between her starved hipbones. Her belly looks long. Where her breasts should be, black spiders are fighting: he sorts these out as Skeeter’s hands. Skeeter is whispering to Jill, murmuring, while his hands flutter like bats against the moon. He hears her say, in a voice sifted through her hair, a sentence with the word “satisfy” in it.

Skeeter cackles: forked lightning. “Now,” he sings, and his voice has become golden hoops spinning forward, an auctioneer who is a juggler, “we will have a demon-stray-shun of o-bee-deeyance, from this little coal-black lady, who has been broken in by expert traders working out of Nashville, Tennessee, and who is guaranteed by them ab-so-lutily to give no trouble in the kitchen, hallway, stable or bedroom!” Another soft slap, and the white clay dwindles; Jill is kneeling, while Skeeter still stands. A most delicate slipping silvery sound touches up the silence now; but Rabbit cannot precisely see. He needs to see. The driftwood lamp is behind him. Not turning his head, he gropes and switches it on.

Nice.

What he sees reminds him, in the first flash, of the printing process, an inked plate contiguous at some few points to white paper. As his eyes adjust, he sees Skeeter is not black, he is a gentle brown. These are smooth-skinned children being gently punished, one being made to stand and the other to kneel. Skeeter crouches and reaches down a long hand, fingernails like baby rose petals, to shield Jill’s profile from the glare. Her eyelids remain closed, her mouth remains open, her breasts cast no shadow they are so shallow, she is feminine most in the swell of her backside spread on her propping heels and in the white lily of a hand floating beside his balls as if to receive from the air a baton. An inch or two of Skeeter’s long cock is un-enclosed by her face, a purplish inch bleached to lilac, below his metallic pubic explosion, the shape and texture of his goatee. Keeping his protective crouch, Skeeter turns his face sheepishly toward the light; his eyeglasses glare opaquely and his upper lip lifts in imitation of pain. “Hey man, what’s with that? Cut that light.”