“Hear that?” Lottie stops and cocks her head to one side.

“I hear it.” I shade my eyes to block the slanting sunlight and pick out a white speck on the horizon. The school pickup. Mrs. Vincent, who usually drives at ten miles an hour, races across the rough ground at high speed to close the gap with us.

“Thank you, Lord.” Mr. Vincent’s faith is instantly renewed.

“Hallelujah,” Mr. Moses adds.

They lay Darnell on the ground and wait to be rescued.

Bosman’s work boots crunch the grass as he strides over to us. We are still on his land, and he wants us off it, no matter what.

Lottie walks out to meet him, with her chin raised. She stands directly in his path, and no mixed-race girl in her right mind stares openly at an angry white man with a gun the way she is right now. We are supposed to look at the ground. We play dumb. We try to disappear. That’s the way we survive.

Instead of becoming invisible, Lottie pins Bosman with a cool stare. I run to her.

“Come . . .” I tug her skirt to warn her to behave, but she shakes me off. She’s Swazi. She knows the penalty for daring to challenge a white man, but she does it anyway. Lottie is insane. She wants Bosman to know that she finds him loathsome.

“What you looking at, coon?” Bosman demands in Afrikaans.

“You,” she says in a loud, clear voice: another challenge.

Bosman spits on the ground, and the girl in the truck stops crying. She huddles close to her brother, her muscles tense in the strained silence that must always come before her father loses his temper. I step closer to Lottie, and freeze when Bosman’s fingers grip the butt of his rifle. I don’t move. I’m scared of dying before my life has properly started, but I stick by Lottie’s side.

“Leave,” Bosman says. “Get off my land.”

“We will.” Lottie stands her ground while Gordon Number One and Barnabas Phillips help the grown men roll Darnell onto a blanket and lift him onto the back of the school truck. The boys climb on board, and Mr. Vincent slams the back shut with a loud bang.

The sound starts Bosman’s daughter off again, and this time, her brother’s soothing words go unheard. She throws her arms over the side of the tray and clutches at the air with her fingers, trying to hold on to something invisible.

The girl’s face is exposed for the first time; she’s around fourteen, with slanted eyes and flat facial features that are so like Darnell’s that I take a sharp breath of wonder. The girl is white and Darnell is mixed-race, but they are the same. They are both simpleminded. The girl’s wild, clutching fingers suddenly make sense. She’s reaching out to Darnell, trying to hold on to him by magic.