They arrived in Tulsa at the Santa Fe rail yard at nine in the morning and were met by Lila’s Aunt Marta and her husband, James. James was as big as Marta was small, both of them dark as dark got, with skin stretched so tight across the bone Luther wondered how they breathed. Big as James was, and he was the height some men only reached on horseback, Marta was, no doubt, the dog who ate first.

Four, maybe five, seconds into the introductions, Marta said, “James, honey, git them bags, would you? Let the poor girl stand there and faint from the weight?”

Lila said, “It’s all right, Auntie, I—”

“James?” Aunt Marta snapped her fingers at James’s hip and the man hopped to. Then she smiled, all pretty and small, and said, “Girl, you as beautiful as you ever was, praise the Lord.”

Lila surrendered her bags to Uncle James and said, “Auntie, this is Luther Laurence, the young man I been writing you about.”

Though he probably should have figured as much, it took Luther by surprise to realize his name had been placed to paper and sent across four state lines to land in Aunt Marta’s hand, the letters touched, however incidentally, by her tiny thumb.

Aunt Marta gave him a smile that had a lot less warmth in it than the one she gave her niece. She took his hand in both of hers. She looked up into his eyes.

“A pleasure to meet you, Luther Laurence. We’re churchgoers here in Greenwood. You a churchgoer?”

“Yes, ma’am. Surely.”

“Well, then,” she said and gave his hand a moist press and a slow shake, “we’re to get along fine, I ’spect.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Luther was prepared for a long walk out of the train station and up through town to Marta and James’s house, but James led them to an Olds Reo as red and shiny as an apple just pulled from a water bucket. Had wood spoke wheels and a black top that James rolled down and latched in the back. They piled the suitcases in the backseat with Marta and Lila, the two of them already talking a mile a minute, and Luther climbed up front with James and they pulled out of the lot, Luther thinking how a colored man driving a car like this in Columbus was just asking to get shot for a thief, but at the Tulsa train station, not even the white folk seemed to notice them.

James explained the Olds had a flathead V8 engine in it, sixty horsepower, and he worked the shift up into third gear and smiled big.

“What you do for work?” Luther asked.

“Own two garages,” James said. “Got four men working under me. Would love to put you to work there, son, but I got all the help I can handle right now. But don’t you worry—one thing Tulsa’s got on either side of the tracks is jobs, plenty of jobs. You in oil country, son. Whole place just sprung up overnight ’cause of the black crude. Shoot. None of this was even here twenty-five years ago. Wasn’t nothing but a trading post back then. Believe that?”