His father had died sixteen months ago, along with near a hundred other colored folk while East St. Louis burned around them. Luther got the word from Hollis, the man’s block letters looking pained and cramped on a sheet of yellow paper:

Yor Daddy shot ded by white men. Sorry to tell you.

Luther walked out of the freight yard and into downtown as the sky was beginning to darken. He had the envelope Uncle Hollis had sent his letter in with his address scrawled on the back, and he pulled it from his coat and held it in his hand as he walked. The deeper he traveled into the colored section the less he could believe what he saw. The streets were empty, and much of the reason, Luther knew, had to do with the flu, but it was also because there wouldn’t seem to be much point to walk streets where all the buildings were either blackened or crumbled or lost forever beneath rubble and ash. It reminded Luther of an old man’s mouth, where most of the teeth were missing, a couple broken in half, and the few that remained leaning to the side and useless. Whole blocks were nothing but ash, great piles of it that the early-evening breeze blew from one side of the street to the other, just trading it back and forth. So much ash that not even a tornado could have erased it all. Over a year since the neighborhood had burned, and those piles stood tall. On those blown-out streets, Luther felt as if he were surely the last man alive, and he figured that if the Kaiser had managed to send his army across the ocean, with all their planes and bombs and rifles, they couldn’t have done more damage.

It had been over jobs, Luther knew, the white working-class folks getting more and more convinced that the reason they were poor was because the colored working-class folks were stealing their jobs and the food off their tables. So they’d come down here, white men and white women and white children, too, and they’d started with the colored men, shooting them and lynching them and setting them afire and even driving several into the Cahokia River and then stoning them to death when they tried to swim back, a job they’d left mostly to the children. The white women pulled colored women off the streetcars and stoned them and stabbed them with kitchen knives, and when the National Guard came, they just stood around and watched it go on.

July 2, 1917.

“Your daddy,” Uncle Hollis said, after Luther showed up at the door of his juke joint and Uncle Hollis took him into the back office and poured him a drink, “was trying to protect that little shop of his never made him a dime. They lit it on fire and called for him to come out and once all four walls were burning down around him, he and Velma came out. Someone shot him in the knee and he lay there on the street for a while. They handed Velma over to some women, and they beat her with rolling pins. Just beat her about the head and face and hips and she die after crawling into an alley, like a dog gone under a porch. Someone come up to your father, and the way I was told, he try to get to his knees, but he can’t even do that and he keep tipping over and pleading and finally a couple white men just stand there and shoot him until they run out of bullets.”