“You saw yourself, as if you were floating above your body.”

Pat nodded.

“You felt small and made of something weak, weaker than flesh.”

Pat nodded, adding that he left the newsroom without saying a word.

“Because your mouth was full of sawdust.”

Pat nodded.

He headed to a whiskey-shop. The drink made him angry, he said.

“At yourself.”

Pat nodded.

I should have told them to go straight to Hell, Mattie. I should have said that there is nothing about you or me that is deplorable. I should have told them your name, your precious name that means truth in the language of the Greek gods. I should have told them that you are a natural beauty. I should have said that you are a born storyteller, and all of them were amateurs compared to you. How dare they call you a woman of color, Mattie—

“That’s what I am, Pat.”

He looked up at me, his eye swollen with sleep and tears. I said nothing, Mattie. Nothing, Pat repeated.

At the whiskey-shop, he drank until he felt emptied of anger, until he couldn’t remember how he got home, until he knocked on his own front door because he couldn’t find his key, until he tried to sit down and passed out instead.

“Where are all your things, Pat?”

He couldn’t remember. Then he said that he must have left his belongings at the whiskey-shop to cover his tab.

“You’ll go get everything tomorrow, Pat. Here, take the week’s food money and use what you need. We’ll make do. We’ve lived on less before.”

Pat then wanted to know how I knew. The muffled hearing, the view from above, the weaker than flesh, the dry mouth, he said.

“They came with my condition, Pat. Charlotte has felt the same. So have Mr. Cleneay and his brothers. Molly, Aunt Sweetie, every colored person you’ve seen and not seen on the streets of Cincinnati, Pat.”

He blinked and blinked.

“The first time is hardest.”

You become accustomed to it, Mattie?

“No, Pat. It’s hardest because the first time happened when we were young.”

Tell me, Mattie, he said, closing his eye.

“When I took my first breath, my first meal from my mother’s breast, I couldn’t have known that I was a slave. I couldn’t have known what a free person was either, as I suckled and waved my tiny fists, grabbing on to air, as if it were all that I had on this earth. When I began to crawl and play with the other young ones who were born in the shacks nearby, we couldn’t have known that we didn’t belong to our mothers, that their love and their bodies couldn’t protect our own. But one day, we, every one of us, learned that we were lesser—worse, that our mothers were lesser—than the white people, lesser than their children, who lived at the edges of our lives.”