On Sundays in the spring, Daddy and Mommy took us for walks up around the mountain, searching for wild mustard, poke, and creasy greens for supper. Mommy carried Kerwin on her back. She had broad cheekbones and brown hair pulled back in a bun so that the top of her head appeared flat. We followed the road the company had gouged out of the mountainside. Mommy said there had only been a path there once. The Negroes lived in the houses on that road. Their houses were tinier than the small ones the company provided for white people. Each Negro family was crammed into two rooms of a four-room double house. The company never painted these houses, and so they were streaked with black. In summer the windows stood open and faded pink or green curtains flapped out in the breeze. The colored people had no porches, so they hunched on their front stoops when they wanted to take some air. Their outhouses were not built over holes, but hung out over the hillside. One night a man broke his arm when white boys toppled over the privy while he was inside.

Skinny yellow dogs barked and lunged at us as we trudged by those houses, and the colored people watched us silently from their stoops. Mommy always walked with her head down, never speaking, for she didn’t like the colored people. Daddy said they never would have come if the coal company hadn’t brought them in.

When we were past the colored houses, we’d start gathering greens. Talcott and I took turns holding the paper poke. Sometimes we went farther up the mountain to the Lloyd family cemetery. Daddy carried a scythe and cut away the weeds from the graves.

One day we climbed to the cemetery but were stopped by a gate and barbed wire fence strung across the road, and a sign which read, NO TRESPASSING. PROPERTY OF AMERICAN COAL.

We never went to the cemetery again.

I attended the Winco School and did well. When I was in the third grade, the teacher, Miss Radcliffe, invited the ten best students to her apartment for oatmeal cookies. She lived in the clubhouse, a building most of us had never entered. It was reserved for the unmarried teachers, nurses, and bookkeepers of the company.

Miss Radcliffe, tall and gray-headed, led us single-file up the stairs and ushered us into her rooms with the air of a genie revealing a treasure. We tiptoed across a rug Miss Radcliffe said was oriental and settled in miserable silence upon her purple-striped sofa and chairs. Miss Radcliffe smiled proudly as we craned our heads to take in the high cherry bookcases with glass doors, the purple-flowered wallpaper, the grandfather clock with gold trim on the door.