The abundance of freedom must be thrilling for little white boys, she thought, and she remembered how as a child she used to swim with them in the river. The girl and her sister and the naked white boys as they played together in the sand—their butts even paler than the rest of their bodies.

In the field the girl took off her earrings, the wide hoops left behind by her mother. They had the appearance of gold, but when she dropped them on the ground in front of her, first one, then the other, they made only a small noise. Not enough to stir the earth, or the white men. They were not real gold.

Without earrings on, she thought, I look like father.

And she did, with her short hair and her hairy arms, Emman looked definitively like her father. But her father had once been a beautiful boy, one the other boys had been jealous of, and even the white boys had been jealous of him. They would stare at him for hours, so it was not an unfortunate thing to resemble him.

The girl was thinking of him and of the smell of tobacco on his thumbs when she fell.

It is shocking to be thrown to the ground suddenly, ridiculous even, and yet that’s what happened to the girl as she dropped her mother’s fake gold earrings and thought about her father. The girl fell hard on her left wrist and hard on her lower back, letting out two pieces of air, one of them a burp.

The girl was clumsy, but this particular collapse wasn’t caused by her clumsiness. A boy was responsible. He was not one of the white men. He was a boy. He stood over her wearing a dirty ivory three-piece suit. The boy did not apologize for bumping into her, or for knocking her to the ground so suddenly, or for making her burp, or for any of the inconveniences that come with falling in front of a crowd. The crowd stared, and the girl stared at the boy, and the boy stared at the girl with confusion and what seemed like delight; the white men did not stare.

Her palms were full of dirt. The boy helped her up but did not provide her with his full strength (he really was no help at all), so when she grabbed hold of his small hands she still had to do most of the work to stand. The muscles in her legs burned, her knees spat.

While the girl tidied herself, the boy picked up the fake gold hoop earrings, putting them into his right pants pocket. He hoped she had not noticed this; he was a collector of things and wanted to keep them for himself.