“For two years Mama turns to bone and leather while some white lawyers from New York try saving him from the electric chair. ‘Just want him alive,’ she keeps saying. ‘Just want to know he’s breathing somewhere.’ And after they strapped him in a chair and shot him full of electricity and the lawyers come by to say how sorry they were and went home, she died.” He raised his head, the white star on his pupil like a brand, and finished savagely, “So now you say let them do to me like they did to my daddy. But I remember. They needed a nigger to make themselves feel better and now they’ll be needing me.”

The sunlight had faded and the old men gone. Lee and I were alone. “You followed her here,” I told him. “No one made you. Twenty years ago a man killed my father. He’s in prison now, or dead—I don’t know which. It doesn’t matter. I won’t waste my life on him. You did that with Hargrave and then Lydia Cantwell, who’d done nothing. Don’t make this out a lynching. You put yourself in the way.”

Lee’s eyes shone with a terrible intensity. “You talk like things end,” he said. “Like I had no reason to come here. But for all my life Daddy kept coming back to me with a due bill in his hand, asking what I’d done; and I’d done nothing. I knew what he’d told Hargrave, standing up in court like a man. But when Mama died I got moved away to a farm with my aunt and uncle. Hargrave was a judge and I was a ten-year-old black boy with no way to reach him. But I knew I’d grow up to kill him—told my uncle I would. ‘When you’re a man, Otis,’ my uncle said. I thought about that all the time I watched myself get big. Used to measure myself against an oak tree with a slash I’d cut to mark how tall my daddy was. When I got closer to sixteen, I stopped measuring for a while. On my sixteenth birthday I stepped out back and walked to the tree. The slash was level with my eyes. It was time.” Lee smiled bitterly. “And then I went inside and my uncle told me Hargrave was four years dead.

“My uncle’s face went dark in front of me. I grabbed his throat with my fist raised. His lips started quivering. ‘Goddamn you to hell,’ I said, and let him go. That night I run away.