I wanted to lash out, and say, Oh yeah, Uncle Tom? That’s what Terrence thinks of you! But I could not ruin a man’s whole life acting out of anger. I wiped my eyes, careful not to smear my mascara. I kept my voice steady as Bette Davis would have. “Why won’t anyone tell me where he’s gone?”

“After what you did to him! We’re telling you nothing! Everything I meant for Terrence and Booker to be, to become, to launch them into the world like men, like men, I say! You undid that.”

“I didn’t do anything! It wasn’t my fault. I’m sorry.”

“When are you and your people going to learn? We don’t want your sorry. We don’t want your thanks.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, tearing up.

“No one’s ever gonna tell you where he’s gone, Roxanne. No one. No one wants you near him ever again. You were toying with a real man for the first time in your sorry, spoiled life.”

“We were in love, we are in love. It wasn’t my fault,” I insisted.

“Whose fault could it possibly be?”

I suppose there were three hundred years of answers to that question, so when he turned away I simply followed him wordlessly up the stairs.

Denise stood poised on the staircase wearing a gingham maternity dress. She was roly-poly, probably put on seventy pounds, and was bloated from the ankles on up. The look on her face was a mélange of menace and disgust. “A Nee-gro, Roxanne? Really. Have you no shame?”

I started to walk past her with nothing more than Gallic disdain, but all my ungovernable instincts kicked in. “At least I’m not passing off one man’s bastard brat as another man’s child.”

Clarence turned and walked away. He certainly did not want to hear any more of that.

Denise paled to the same color as her blonde hair; her mouth opened and she gawped before she managed, “How dare you talk to me like that?”

“I know Jonathan Moore, and I know he bagged you. That’s his favorite word for the women he’s had. You were bagged, pure and simple.”

“You shut up. It wasn’t ever like that.”

“You wanna bet?” I was pleased that I’d hurt her, cruel, small-minded as that makes me. I walked away, realizing I only had so much strength and I’d spent a wad of it with Clarence, and I wasn’t going to squander the rest with that whore Denise Dell, not when I had to face Leon Greene.

He stood in front of the library’s stained glass windows and held the newspaper in one hand, waving it at me like a matador. “Sleeping with a Negro! Unthinkable! You stupid, reckless girl! Look at what you’ve done!”

“What have I done? I fell in love.”