“It would be a real loss.”

“What if I never die?”

He smiled. “Then we both gonna be happy, sister. But you know all people gotta die some day. Ain’t that right?”

“That’s surely right,” she said.

He sold her two other plots, one for each of her daughters. “You got friends lost their burying money when the banks failed, same as you?”

“I surely do. A buryin’ place for a nickel and a dime! I can’t hardly believe it.”

“Give me their names and I’ll drop around and see them,” Calvin said. It was the beginning of the American Eagle Life Insurance Company.

Spurgeon remembered the day Momma brought Calvin home. He was sitting in the room doing homework when the key grated in the locked door and he knew it had to be Momma. He got up to greet her and when the door opened there was a man with her, not tall, half-bald, silver-rimmed spectacles, quizzical brown eyes that looked directly at him, weighing him, judging him and evidently liking what they observed because the man smiled and his hand took Spurgeon’s, pumping it in a sure, dry grasp.

“I’m Calvin Priest.”

“The President?”

“What? Oh.” He laughed. “Yes.” He looked slowly around the room, seeing the waterstained ceiling, the murky wallpaper, the broken borax furniture.

“You can’t live here any more,” he said to her.

Her voice broke in her throat. “Mr. Priest,” she whispered. “You have the wrong idea about me. I’m just a plain, ordinary colored girl. I’m not even really a secretary. What I’ve been most of my life is a waitress.”

“You’re a lady,” he said. When Roe-Ellen told the story again and again for the rest of her life she always said that his exact words were, “You’re my lady,” Don Quixote to Dulcinea.

Neither Spurgeon nor Calvin ever contradicted her.

By the following week he had installed them in the apartment in Riverdale. She must have told him a lot about them. When they got there, a quart of Borden’s Grade-A was on the dining room table in an ice-filled champagne bucket, next to a bowl of Gristede’s honey.

“You mean we made it, Momma? This is it?” Spurgeon asked.

Roe-Ellen couldn’t answer him but Calvin rubbed the woolly head. “You crossed the river, son,” he said.

They were married a week later and left for a month in the Virgin Islands. A fat, happy woman named Bessie McCoy stayed with Spurgeon. She did crossword puzzles all day long and cooked fine meals and left him alone except for an occasional query about esoteric words he could never supply.

When the newlyweds returned, Calvin devoted several weeks to the task of selecting a good private school for him, deciding ultimately on Horace Mann, a fine liberal prep school whose campus was not far from the apartment house in Riverdale, and after entrance examinations and interviews to Spurgeon’s enormous relief he was accepted.

His relationship with Calvin was a good one, but once he asked his step-father why he didn’t do more for others of their own race.