‘I won’t have those women saying I keep a dirty house,’ she said.

‘Tonight? Ah, Jesus – Youngblood’s dopey wife? What’s she going to peep in your oven for?’

I took my tape recorder with us. In the car, Atlas is saying, ‘Now you tell me, how do you explain getting a job in a railroad yard to a woman like Claire? Or a bath in a tin tub: scrubbed by an old hag? How can you explain what magical and terrifying experiences these were? And afterwards: a bed to sleep on, sheets, shoes, clothes—’

‘And you’re different from Claire, are you?’

‘Don’t bitch at me,’ he said. ‘I’m no kid of privilege like you. I don’t know how the hell dad slept at all those first few nights. In fact I’ll bet he didn’t.’

Liquor turned out to be only two aisles from oven cleaners. Outside in the parking lot, Atlas tucked a half bottle of whiskey into each of his back pockets, well hidden by the hang of his coat. This was plainly standard procedure – though it says something for his delicacy that he didn’t suggest by so much as a gesture that I might smuggle a bottle past Claire for him. ‘But what the hell,’ he went on then, ‘I guess you got a point. Slavery was just a bedtime story to me when I was little. So was Emancipation. You can’t understand something like that unless you’ve been through it yourself. I remember—’ He broke off.

‘What?’ I pressed.

‘Oh, I don’t know. I guess it’s not relevant.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

‘There was this black guy – I couldn’t have been more than six or seven at the time. I don’t know how he got to Hannaville. We had Swedes and Norwegians all over the place, but nobody black. Not then. Anyhow, this guy – his name was Nero – he had a wife and several children, and they all just appeared one day out of nowhere. Nobody knew what to do with them. They had no money. Nothing at all. A couple of kind-hearted locals hired him for small jobs, but he didn’t seem to be able to do anything right and he was so slow at what he did do that nobody could bear it. So the question was, what do you do with them? Run them out of town? There was a meeting about it – all the town worthies – and dad took me with him. I don’t remember why. The argument got pretty heated and then out of the blue dad said, “I’ll hire him. Where is he?”

‘Jesus, we didn’t have enough to keep ourselves, much less a family of six or so on top. Everybody knew that. They all said the guy was so stupid he ought to be locked up. All you had to do was look at the way he rolled his eyes, they said. Dad wouldn’t budge. So they sent for the guy. They kind of roughed him along and brought him up to dad, and dad said, as polite as if he was talking to the mayor, “Will you work for me, Nero?”