It was the day we never got to Edenton to see the Colonel and his Marine Corps of begonias. It was the Worst of All Sundays because I had not played dumb, I had overtrusted.

•  •  •

I had thought adults could solve things, and that I would help them do that. I had thought a life was some advanced math problem you could just answer and then be done considering. I didn’t know that the last person who knows how to solve a given problem is usually the person whose life created it. I understood nothing. But I already guessed I’d made a huge mistake, and that I’d only just begun to see its sad results play out.

And yet (I tried to help myself through this) wasn’t my mistake what’d finally introduced me to my dad? I surely now possessed his past’s single hugest secret. For that, at least, I felt half grateful and even partway proud. I wished we could be driven fast to Sutie’s house. We’d recover there, the three of us eating biscuits on her shady porch, us steadily visiting, me asking everything at last.

All I knew: I’d far rather be Clyde’s—if that meant “black” or Packard or maple syrup—than “white” in the cold snide way of Doc Dick Dix. I’d do anything to remain Clyde Delman’s boy. Whoever Clyde was, whatever-colored a Clyde he’d likely to stay, I would be right there alongside.

Could you choose? You can choose.

Standing here with farmers acting nice to me and asking did I want a drink of water or some sweet-potato pie still hot back at their house, I guessed I must become way stronger. Would these men be acting so kindly if they knew my dad’s real race and maybe mine?

I would have to try and correct everything for my father now. What had I really glimpsed about his past and color? Was it even true? And of me, too? Didn’t knowing you might not be white itself revoke your front-row pass? So willingly I gave mine up!

I must now struggle far harder for Dad, I must take over some. Clyde wouldn’t need to know I’d guessed about his and my’s being black and all. I’d hide from him how I must defend forever the man who’d defended and “changed” me from birth on. Clyde I would protect, as he had said that he would die for me.

I felt my whole life reorganize itself, around the sudden single goal of keeping Clyde my real true dad. I had never asked to be born “White and Blond and Blue.” He never begged for “Black and Blue and Brown and White.” But he’d sure signed on for me. And he sure had me now, forever.

My one wish: To shield him. To beat the others back. But, standing here, I suddenly felt so old. Older than Clyde. I was now his beholden if maybe unbegotten son. Weak-kneed, huge-headed, I waited here by the side the road feeling older than our world.