St. Louis, 1955
There was what you did, and there was what somebody said you did, and a Black man in St. Louis learned early that the second one carried more weight. Samuel Carter had understood that before he understood taxes or women or automobiles, before he understood why his father went quiet whenever a police cruiser came down the block. His mother called it knowing the room. His father called it staying alive. By twenty-two Samuel was good at both, which is another way of saying he had spent his whole life studying a subject he had never chosen.
He knew when to take off his cap and when to say sir and when not to smile, because a smile in the wrong doorway became disrespect. He knew the exact distance at which eye contact turned into staring, and the exact distance at which avoiding it turned into guilt. He knew how far behind a white woman to walk after dark. He knew which businesses wanted his money and not his presence, and which streets belonged to everybody at noon and to nobody Black after sundown.
None of it was written down anywhere.
That was the thing about it. His father had put it to him once, in the truck, when Samuel was fourteen and had asked a question he did not yet know was dangerous. The law they put in books is the law they got to explain , James Carter had said, looking straight ahead at the road. It’s the other one that’ll kill you.
Samuel hadn’t understood then. He was eight years past that conversation now, and he understood it the way you understand weather.
Thursday began like any other Thursday. That was the part he could never afterward forgive it for.
He woke at 5:18 because the kitchen clock ran twelve minutes fast and his mother would not hear of replacing it. Ruth Carter maintained that it kept people punctual. Samuel maintained that it kept people confused. The argument had been running since 1949 and neither of them had ever won it, which was, he suspected, the reason she kept the clock.
“Samuel!”
Her voice came up through the floor.
“You planning on working today?”
He opened one eye. “Clock’s lying again.”
“The clock got a better job than you do.”
He smiled into the pillow. “Morning to you too, Mama.”
“Feet on the floor.”
He put his feet on the floor. Everybody did, eventually, with Ruth — not because she was loud, but because arguing with her cost more energy than surrendering, and she had worked that out about human beings a long time ago.
The room was barely wide enough for the bed and the dresser and the small desk his father had built out of leftover lumber the summer before he died. Law books took up most of the desk: old editions, discarded textbooks, whatever Samuel could find secondhand for under a dollar. He kept newspapers over them when company came. Not out of shame. Dreams got fragile when too many people put their hands on them.
His father’s photograph stood on the dresser. Sunday suit, serious face, the expression of a man who had been told to hold still and had taken the instruction personally.
Samuel picked it up.
“Morning, old man.”
Three years gone. Heart attack, at forty-nine — too young to die and old enough to have spent three decades hauling things around that his body eventually declined to keep carrying.
He set the photograph down and got dressed.
The smell of bacon caught him halfway down the stairs.
Ruth was at the stove with her hair wrapped, fifty-four years old, short and built like something you would not want to push. She had the ability to fry eggs, follow the radio, criticize her son, and register the movement of the neighbor’s curtains, all at once and without appearing to divide her attention.
Samuel kissed her cheek.
“Button that shirt.”
“I just got down here.”
“And already disappointing me.”
Lorraine was at the table with a magazine. Seventeen, and in possession of the specific serenity of a girl who knows exactly how much she can get away with in her own house. Samuel took a piece of bacon off her plate.
She slapped his hand. “Get your own.”
“I pay rent.”
“You pay Mama rent.”
“I live here.”
“So do roaches.”
Samuel turned to his mother. “You hear how she talks to me?”
Ruth set a plate of eggs in front of him without looking up. “Probably learned it from somebody.”
This was the house: cracked yellow paint by the window, the radio beside the breadbox, curtains Ruth had sewn herself out of material she’d argued a man down on. Three mismatched chairs.
And his father’s chair at the end of the table.
Nobody sat in it. Nobody had ever said out loud that nobody sat in it. The chair had belonged to James Carter and death had not altered the seating arrangement in that kitchen, and Samuel had come to understand that this was not sentiment. It was simply that nobody in the family had ever seen a reason to hold a vote about it.
The radio worked through Eisenhower, the weather, the Cardinals, and then something about racial tension farther south.
Ruth reached over and turned it down.
Samuel noticed. “Don’t want to hear it?”
“I hear enough.”
Lorraine looked up. “What happened?”
“Nothing you need before breakfast.”
“I’m seventeen.”
“And I’m your mother.”
Lorraine went back to her magazine with an expression suggesting the matter was not closed but had been tabled.
Ruth’s eyes found the law book sticking out of Samuel’s work bag.
“You studying tonight?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Mama, I’m tired when I get home.”
She put the spatula down, and Samuel knew before she opened her mouth exactly where this was going, because it went there roughly twice a month and had since he was nineteen.
“You think the men writing those laws are tired?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You think they get too tired to decide where you can eat? Where Lorraine goes to school? Whether your daddy could buy a house on the street he wanted?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t get tired either.”
Samuel ate his eggs.
“You really know how to make breakfast relaxing,” he said.
“Eat.”
He looked at his father’s chair while he did. James had never been enthusiastic about law school. Not because he thought his son couldn’t — he’d never once suggested that — but because he had spent forty-nine years watching capability fail to convert into opportunity, and he had not wanted to watch it happen to Samuel at close range. Ruth believed the opposite. Or performed believing it, every morning, at that stove.
Samuel had never worked out which one took more courage.
Lorraine followed him onto the porch.
“Sam.”
He turned.
She glanced back at the window to confirm their mother wasn’t watching, then held out an envelope.
“What’s this?”
“Open it later.”
He opened it immediately.
Three dollars.
He looked up. “Where’d you get this?”
“Saving.”
“For what?”
“None of your business.”
He tried to hand it back and she stepped away from it like he’d offered her something hot.
“Take it.”
“Lorraine—”
“For the application.”
Samuel went still. “What application?”
She rolled her eyes with her entire upper body. “The law school one you keep pretending you ain’t filling out.”
“How you know about that?”
“You hide things terribly .”
He laughed. “I can’t take your money.”
“You steal my bacon every single morning.”
“That’s different. Bacon is family property.”
She pushed the envelope against his chest and held it there until he took it.
Samuel looked down at his little sister — who had been six years old and afraid of the dark not very long ago, by his accounting — and heard himself ask a question he had not planned on asking anybody.
“You believe I can do it?”
Lorraine frowned. Not a considering frown. A frown of genuine confusion, as though he had asked her whether water was wet.
“Why wouldn’t you?”
It went into him somewhere below the ribs.
He put the envelope in his shirt pocket. “Thank you.”
“When you get rich I want a Cadillac.”
“You gave me three dollars.”
“Investment.”
He kissed her forehead. “Go to school.”
“Go lift boxes.”
He was halfway down the steps when she called after him.
“Convertible!”
He turned around. “Now you’re just greedy.”
She waved him off and went inside.
Samuel would think about that envelope for the rest of his life, and not because three dollars changed anything. It was that somebody had looked at him before the world had finished deciding what he was worth, and had simply assumed, without being asked, that he was going to become more.
Franklin Hardware & Supply took up a brick storefront on a commercial block where the trucks started at six. The front of the building belonged to customers. The back belonged to men like Samuel, and the two halves met at a swinging door that everybody understood without anybody having explained it.
Clarence Webb was already out back smoking when Samuel came around the corner. Thirty-eight, tall, narrow as a fence rail, and in possession of a cigarette that seemed to have been issued to him at birth along with his name.
“Late,” Clarence said.
Samuel looked at the clock through the window. “I’m three minutes early.”
“That’s late if I’m already standing here.”
“That is not how time works.”
Clarence blew smoke at the overhang. “White man’s clock.”
“Now time’s segregated?”
“Everything else is.”
Mr. Franklin came through the back door and both of them straightened without discussing it — an adjustment so automatic that Samuel had stopped noticing he made it somewhere around his second month.
“Morning, Samuel. Clarence. Shipment came in early.”
“We’ll handle it,” Samuel said.
“Need the lawn equipment out front before noon.”
He went back inside.
Clarence watched the door swing shut.
“You hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“He said we .”
Samuel got a hand under the end of a crate. “You planning on helping with any of this?”
“I’m talking about Franklin.” Clarence dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, unhurried. “White folks have discovered a powerful word. We. Means you do the work and everybody shares the credit.”
Samuel laughed and they carried the crate in together.
By eleven his shirt was through with sweat and there were forty more crates.
Mrs. Caldwell came in every Thursday. White, past sixty, and lonely enough to buy things she didn’t need for the privilege of talking to somebody who would answer her.
She brought a broken hinge to the counter and set it down like evidence.
“My cabinet is trying to fall apart.”
“Cabinet or the hinge?”
“At my age, possibly both.”
Samuel turned it over. “Three-inch replacement’ll do it.”
“I knew you’d know.”
He went and found one. When he came back she was still standing there.
“You still reading those books?”
He stopped. “What books?”
“The law books. You left one behind the counter last month.” She said it without any particular weight. “My husband was an attorney.”
Samuel had known this woman for two years and had not known that.
“Was?”
“Eight years now. Don’t be sorry, he was irritating alive as well.”
Samuel laughed before he could decide whether he was allowed to.
“I still have some of his books,” she said. “If you’d want them.”
“Mrs. Caldwell—”
“They’re collecting dust in a room I don’t go in. Come Saturday.”
He looked at her for a second.
“Yes, ma’am.”
When she’d gone, Clarence materialized at his elbow the way he did.
“What’d she want?”
“Cabinet hinge.”
Clarence waited.
Samuel kept working.
Clarence let it sit for about four seconds, which was his outer limit.
“And law books.”
“Look at you.” Clarence stepped back and looked him up and down like a man appraising a horse. “Samuel Carter, Esquire.”
“Don’t start.”
“ Counselor. ”
Samuel shoved him and Clarence went off laughing.
At lunch they sat on the loading dock with their backs against the brick and the sun coming down into the alley.
“You mail that application yet?”
“Maybe.”
“You been saying maybe about eleven months.”
“I’m saving.”
Clarence tapped ash into an empty bottle and didn’t say anything for a while, which was unlike him.
“Dreams don’t die dramatic, Samuel,” he said. “That’s the thing people get wrong about them. Ain’t a moment. Nobody comes and takes it off you.”
Samuel looked over.
“They starve,” Clarence said. “Little bit at a time. And you’re busy, and you’re tired, and it’s Thursday again. Then one morning you wake up and you can’t remember what it was you used to feed.”
Samuel didn’t have anything to say to that.
Clarence put the cigarette out against the concrete.
“Send the application.”
“You sound like my mama.”
“Your mama sounds intelligent.”
“Don’t tell her that. She already knows.”
He got off shortly after six.
He stopped at Henderson’s because Ruth needed bread, and because he wanted peaches — hers, not his. She would tell him he was wasting money and then eat them over the sink.
The bell over the door rang.
He took off his cap.
Mr. Henderson counted the change out onto the counter rather than into his hand, the way he had every week for two years. Samuel picked it up off the wood and put it in his pocket and thanked him and did not react, because reacting was the whole point of the gesture and he had decided a long time ago not to pay for it.
Another rule. There were hundreds.
A young white woman came in as he was leaving. Mary Henderson — nineteen or twenty, yellow dress, brown hair curled carefully around her face in a way that had taken somebody most of an hour.
Samuel stepped aside to let her through.
“Thank you.”
“Ma’am.”
He went out.
That should have been the end of it. He would think about that for years — how completely it should have been the end of it, how many thousands of times a day that exact exchange happened in that city and produced nothing at all.
Billy Crawford and Tommy Price were leaning against the front of the store.
Samuel and Tommy had played baseball together until they were about nine, in the lot behind the church, back before the adults involved got around to explaining the situation. One afternoon Tommy’s mother had called him home in a particular voice. The next day Tommy said they couldn’t play anymore. Neither of them had understood it. They had both obeyed it, immediately and permanently, and that was the part Samuel thought about now — how fast they’d both taken instruction they couldn’t even follow the reasoning of.
Samuel opened his Coca-Cola against the edge of the crate rack and took a drink.
Behind him, somebody whistled.
Sharp. Short. Two notes, the second one bent up at the end.
Samuel stopped walking.
He knew, even as his foot came down, that stopping was the mistake. He had been trained out of it since he was fourteen. You do not turn around. You do not react. You do not become a person who is present at an event.
He turned around.
Mary had come out onto the step.
She had stopped too.
Billy was grinning at nothing in particular, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders up around his ears, delighted with himself in the specific way of a man who has done something in public and gotten away with it.
Tommy elbowed him hard. “ Idiot. ”
Mary’s face had gone red to the hairline. Two men outside the barbershop had already turned to look, and a woman with a stroller had stopped on the corner, and Samuel understood that the situation now had an audience, and that an audience changes what a thing is.
Then he watched her do the arithmetic.
It took maybe a second and a half. Her eyes went to Billy, and away. To Tommy, and away.
To Samuel.
And stayed.
He saw the exact moment she arrived at the answer that cost her the least, and he understood — before she opened her mouth, with enough time to have said something and no idea what — that she was going to take it.
She lifted her hand and pointed.
“He whistled at me.”
One sentence. That was all it took, and afterward Samuel could never make it feel proportionate, no matter how many times he laid it out. Nine words in a yellow dress on a Thursday evening.
“No, ma’am,” he said.
Mary stared at him. “He did .”
Billy looked at the sidewalk.
Tommy’s face had emptied out completely.
Samuel turned to him. “Tommy.”
Tommy’s eyes came up and met his, and there was something in them Samuel recognized, and it was not confusion.
“You heard it.”
Tommy said nothing.
Men were coming out of the barbershop now. Ray Bishop came through them — twenty-six, construction, big through the shoulders and arms. Samuel had sold him a pound of eightpenny nails two weeks earlier and they had talked about the weather.
“You calling this lady a liar?”
And there it was: the question with no exit. Yes was the end of him. No was a confession. Samuel had been taught this trap by his father, in the truck, at fourteen, and had never once expected to be standing inside it.
“I’m saying it wasn’t me.”
Beside the wall, Billy shifted his weight.
Samuel caught it.
“Ask him.”
Billy looked up. “What?”
“You know what.”
Billy laughed — one syllable, badly done. “I don’t know nothing.”
Tommy was staring at the pavement.
“ Tommy. ”
Nothing.
Ray turned. “Did you hear it or not?”
Tommy opened his mouth.
“Why you asking him?” Billy said, too fast and too loud. “Lady already said what happened.”
And Mary looked at Billy.
For about one second Samuel saw it cross her face — the whole thing, complete, the knowledge and the shame of it, arriving and being recognized and being set down again.
Then somebody in the crowd said the word police .
Somebody else said police weren’t needed for this.
A third voice, further back, said something about manners.
The crowd came in a step, the way a crowd does, without anybody appearing to move.
Ray took hold of Samuel’s shoulder.
“You hear what she said?”
“It wasn’t me.” Samuel looked past him. “Tommy. You know .”
Billy pushed off the wall. “Leave him out of it.”
And Samuel turned and looked at Billy Crawford, and stopped suspecting.
Billy had whistled. Not a guess. The pitch of it, the two notes, the bend at the end — it had come from eight feet behind his right shoulder, at the height of a man leaning on a storefront, and Samuel had heard it as clearly as he had ever heard anything in his life.
Ray heard the silence and turned his head. “Billy?”
Billy shrugged.
“So what if I did?”
Everything in Samuel’s head went quiet.
Ray had heard that. Ray was standing four feet away with his hand still on Samuel’s shoulder and he had heard it.
Tommy had heard it. Mary had heard it. The men from the barbershop had heard it, and the woman on the corner, and Mr. Henderson through the screen door.
The truth was standing in the middle of the sidewalk with its hands in its pockets, and it had said itself out loud, unprompted.
Samuel looked at Ray.
“You heard him.”
Ray’s grip loosened. Not much. Enough that Samuel felt it, and felt, for about two seconds, something that was almost relief.
It should have ended there.
Then Earl Dawson came through the crowd.
“What’s going on?”
And Mary answered before anyone else could, faster than she had answered the first time, because the second telling of a thing is always easier than the first.
“He whistled at me.”
Samuel stared at her.
She could not look at him. She did not look at him again that evening, and would not look at him again for eleven years.
Earl looked Samuel over the way you look at a load somebody has left in your driveway.
“Boy don’t know his place.”
And Samuel went cold from the neck down, because he finally understood the machine he was standing in.
Ray knew. Billy knew — Billy had announced it. Tommy knew. Mary knew.
And now Earl Dawson didn’t have to know anything at all, because the story had gotten out ahead of the truth, and the story was more useful, and there was nobody on that sidewalk with any reason to slow it down.
Somebody laughed.
Somebody said, “Get a rope.”
And his father’s voice arrived from eight years back, from the cab of a truck on a road outside town, saying the thing Samuel had heard a hundred times and had never once had to use:
Don’t wait till you know you’re in trouble. By then it’s too late.
Samuel twisted out from under Ray’s hand.
The grocery bag went down. Bread hit the pavement. A peach came out of the top and rolled off the curb into the street, and a car went over it without slowing.
Samuel ran.
Run
Samuel knew St. Louis the way you know a house in the dark.
He knew which alleys connected and which ones dead-ended behind a fence somebody had put up in ’51. He knew which dogs were chained and which had the run of a yard, which gates stuck in humidity, which abandoned buildings on Delmar still had their back doors hanging. He had absorbed all of it without ever intending to, the way anybody absorbs the shape of the place they’ve lived their whole life.
He had never once thought of it as a map of ways to survive.
Tonight it converted, instantly and completely, and he ran through a city he had known for twenty-two years and did not recognize at all.
“There he is!”
He went into an alley off Easton with his heart already past what it could sustain. Footsteps came in behind him — more than three, less than ten, that was as close as he could get. A bottle came over his shoulder and broke against the brick ahead of him and he ran through the glass.
His lungs were finished by the third block. He wasn’t built for this. He loaded crates for a living and had the shoulders for it and none of the wind — different muscles, different work, and none of it the kind that keeps a man ahead of somebody who played ball until he was twenty.
“ Samuel! ”
Ray’s voice.
“Stop!”
And Samuel almost laughed out loud, running, with his chest on fire.
Stop.
The word was so absurd that some part of him wanted to turn around and take the question seriously. Stop and do what? Stand there while men who had already decided what he’d done explained it back to him? There was no version of stopping that ended with him going home. Ray had to know that. Ray had said it anyway, and Samuel understood that Ray needed it on the record — needed to be able to say afterward that he’d given the man a chance.
He put a hand on the top of a wooden fence and went over it. His trouser leg caught on a nail head and tore from the knee down, and he came off it badly and something turned in his left ankle.
He kept going.
On a porch on the next street a Black woman was sitting with a basin in her lap. She looked at Samuel, and then past him at what was coming, and her whole face changed in the space of a breath.
“ Baby, run. ”
Six men came out of the crowd.
The rest fell off over the next fifteen blocks, and the reasons were ordinary. Some were out of breath. Some found that the thing had gone past what they’d wanted from it, which had been a scene outside a grocery, not this. Some had wives who’d be asking. And some of them, Samuel would think later, had simply discovered that shouting on a sidewalk and running a man down in the dark are two different activities, and that they were only equipped for the first.
Six kept going.
Ray Bishop. Earl Dawson. Billy Crawford. Tommy Price. Frank Miller. Charlie Hayes.
Samuel knew four of them by name and face, and that fact kept coming back at him between strides like something loose in a machine.
Ray had bought nails from him and talked about the weather. Tommy had been his friend, actually his friend, for three summers in a lot behind a church. Frank Miller went to a church three blocks from Ruth’s, and Samuel had seen him on the sidewalk on Sunday mornings in a good suit. Charlie Hayes delivered milk and had once carried a crate in for Mrs. Odell two doors down because her hip was bad.
Ordinary men.
That was the thing Samuel could not get around, then or ever. If they had been monsters he could have understood it. Monsters do monstrous things; that’s the whole arrangement, that’s what the word is for.
Ordinary men had to decide . Each one of them, separately, somewhere between the grocery and the treeline, had arrived at a moment where he could have stopped running and had chosen not to. Six times, six men.
That was worse than a monster. Samuel had known it was worse before he was out of the city.
Tommy Price ran behind Ray and wanted to stop.
He held onto that. He held onto it that night and for the next eleven years — I wanted to stop — as though the wanting were a thing that had happened, as though it went on any ledger anywhere.
Billy came up beside him, running easy, still grinning.
“You see his face? Boy looked like he was fixing to piss himself.”
“You need to tell them.”
Billy’s grin came down. “Tell them what?”
“You whistled.”
“So?”
Tommy slowed.
Billy got a fistful of his shirt and pulled him back up to speed without breaking stride. “Don’t you start.”
“Samuel didn’t do nothing.”
“Then why’s he running?”
And it stopped Tommy cold — not the cruelty of it but the stupidity , the perfect circular idiocy of a sentence that made a man guilty for the act of not wanting to be killed. Billy said it and believed it. That was the part. He wasn’t being clever.
Ray shouted from up ahead. “Come on!”
Tommy could have stopped right there.
He worked it out afterward a thousand times, and it was always the same: there was nothing holding him. He could have turned around at that intersection and walked home in nine minutes. He could have gone to the police. He could have gone to Mary’s father’s store and said one sentence and ended the whole thing.
He looked back at the city, at the lights, at the direction of his own house.
Then he looked at five men running.
Tommy ran.
He spent years trying to construct an answer for it, and there was never one that held any weight. It was not fear, exactly. It was not hate; he did not hate Samuel Carter and never had.
Everybody else was running.
So he ran too.
The streetlights gave out at the edge of the city and the ground stopped being flat.
Samuel had never been in these woods after dark. He had been out here twice as a boy, in daylight, with a fishing pole, and he had no idea what was in front of him.
Branches came out of nowhere at face height. Roots took his feet twice. His ankle had gone from pain to a kind of hot numbness he knew was worse. His breathing had turned into something he could hear from outside himself.
“Lord.”
Another twenty yards.
“Lord, please.”
The gunshot came flat and enormous through the trees and Samuel was on the ground before he’d decided to be. The round went into a trunk somewhere ahead and to the left with a sound like an axe.
Behind him, men laughed.
He knew the laugh. He had heard it four hours ago outside a grocery store, one syllable, badly done.
Samuel got up and ran.
And his family came at him all at once, uninvited, the way things do when the body has given up on managing anything: his father in the Sunday suit on the dresser. His mother at the stove with the spatula down, telling him the men who write the laws don’t get tired.
Lorraine, on the porch, pushing an envelope against his chest.
For the application.
Why wouldn’t you?
Samuel made a sound that was not a word.
He was not supposed to die tonight. That was the thing his mind kept returning to, insisting on, as though there were somebody to appeal to. Not tonight, and not for this. Not because a man whistled at a girl. Not because the girl was afraid. Not because six men had needed somewhere to put whatever it was they had been carrying around all summer.
He ran.
Then the woods changed.
He noticed it before he could say what it was. The air got cooler — not gradually, but across about four strides, ten degrees of it, like walking into a cellar. The insects stopped. The shouting behind him seemed to fall back and grow thin, even though he knew, from the sound of the brush, that the men were closer than they had been.
And Samuel saw the tree.
It stood by itself in a clearing that should not have been there, and it was enormous — the trunk wider across than his mother’s house, roots standing up out of the ground in loops a man could walk under. The bark was scarred all over in long vertical marks that his eye kept trying to resolve into letters and could not.
There was a split in the trunk.
Blue light was coming out of it.
Samuel stopped running.
Cold came off the opening and moved over him, and August went away entirely. For about one second he smelled rain, and salt water, and woodsmoke, and three or four things he had no words for at all.
Behind him, brush broke.
“ There! ”
Ray came out of the trees first, with Earl a step behind him.
Then Billy, with the revolver already up. Then Tommy. Then Frank Miller and Charlie Hayes, both of them slowing as they came into the clearing, both of them looking at the light.
Samuel backed toward the tree.
Ray had stopped walking. “What in the hell is that?”
Nobody answered him.
Earl was holding the rope.
Samuel looked at it — coiled over the man’s shoulder, ordinary, the kind of rope they sold at Franklin’s for eleven cents a foot — and understood that he was looking at the entire remainder of his life.
A rope. A gun. Six men who had run four miles in the dark.
Or a hole in a tree with blue light coming out of it.
It was not much of a choice, and Samuel would tell people for the rest of his life that he had not made a decision at all — that he had simply run out of directions.
Ray took a step forward with his hands out from his sides.
“Samuel.”
Samuel backed up.
“Don’t.”
“Nobody’s going to hurt you. We just want to talk.”
Samuel looked at the rope on Earl’s shoulder, and then back at Ray.
“Talk.”
Earl glanced down at his own hand like a man who had forgotten what was in it.
Samuel’s back touched the cold.
“Get away from there,” Billy said, and brought the revolver up level.
Samuel looked past him at Tommy Price — his friend, at nine years old, in a lot behind a church — and said the last thing he said in that St. Louis.
“Tell them.”
Tommy’s mouth opened.
“ Grab him! ” Billy shouted.
Ray lunged.
Samuel stepped backward into the light.
For half a second he saw everything.
Water, and a great deal of it. Ships with too many people on them. Fields going out further than a field should go. Fire in a street. Faces he had never seen and one or two he almost had. Hands — Black hands and white hands, working, holding, striking, folded in prayer. Children. Old people. A courthouse. A rope. A schoolroom.
A thousand moments laid one on top of another until they stopped being separate.
Then nothing at all.
Ray Bishop stopped six feet from the opening.
Samuel was gone. Not hidden, not around the back of the trunk. Gone, out of a clearing with seven men in it.
“Where’d he go?”
The blue light pulsed once, slowly, like something breathing.
Earl took a step back. “No.”
Ray leaned and looked into the split. There was nothing inside it. No hollow, no depth, no back wall — just the light, and cold air coming out steadily as though from a room.
Billy brought the revolver up and aimed it into the tree.
Tommy grabbed his arm. “Don’t.”
Billy shoved him off hard enough to put him down on one knee.
Ray was still looking into the opening.
“We ain’t letting him get away.”
Earl stared at him. “Get away where ?”
Ray walked into the tree and was gone.
Billy swore, loudly, at nobody, and went after him.
Earl stood there with the rope on his shoulder for a good five seconds. Samuel had been right about the man in every particular except one — Earl Dawson was not brave, and what took him through the tree was not courage. It was that Ray and Billy had gone and he had not, and there were three men standing there who would remember it.
He crossed.
Frank Miller crossed himself and followed.
Charlie Hayes went after Frank without a word, and Charlie would later be unable to give any account of why, and would be telling the truth about that.
Tommy Price was alone in the clearing.
He looked behind him, back the way they had come — four miles of dark, and then streetlights, and then his own street.
He could walk home. He could tell the whole city that Samuel Carter had disappeared into the woods, and every word of it would be true, and nobody would ever be able to prove otherwise.
The light flickered.
You know , Samuel had said. Twice. On a sidewalk and in a clearing.
Tommy stepped through.
The tree had been standing there before the ships came.
Before Missouri, before St. Louis, before there was a country with a name to argue about. Before anybody had thought to decide that the color of a man’s skin should determine which door he used, which was not an old idea at all, though it was always presented as one.
People had given the tree names over the years, in several languages, and none of the names were right.
It was not good. It was not evil. It did not punish anybody and it did not forgive anybody and as far as could be determined it had no opinion whatsoever about the seven men who went into it that August.
It simply opened.
Not forward. Not backward.
Sideways.
Sideways
Samuel woke with dirt in his mouth.
He lay still for a while before he tried anything, because some part of him had already worked out that he was lying on the ground and that this was information worth being careful with. Then he rolled onto his back.
Daylight. Not the gray at the front end of it either — real morning, the sun already well up through the canopy, and birds going at each other overhead the way they do around seven.
He sat up fast.
No Ray. No Earl. No Billy. No men at all in any direction, and no rope, and no sound of anything larger than a squirrel.
Samuel laughed. It came out badly and turned into coughing and he had to put his head down between his knees until it passed.
He went over himself with both hands, methodically, the way you do after a fall. No bullet hole. The ankle was swollen inside the shoe and would carry him if he was reasonable about it. Both palms were cut, his shirt was open from the shoulder, and the trouser leg was gone from the knee down.
Alive. All of it added up to alive.
“Thank you,” he said out loud, and could not have told anybody whether he meant God or the tree.
The trunk stood behind him, enormous in the daylight and considerably less impossible.
There was no blue light. There was no split that he could find, and he walked the whole circumference of it twice looking, running his hand along the bark, and what he found was bark.
“Open.”
Nothing happened, which he had expected, and which disappointed him anyway.
He put his shoulder into it. “Come on.”
Nothing.
He hit the trunk with the side of his fist and the pain went up his arm to the elbow, and Samuel stood in a clearing holding his own hand and started laughing again.
“Talking to a tree.”
Then the laughing stopped, and what took over was the flat practical part of him that had gotten him through the last eight hours, and it began making a list.
Find the road. Find a telephone. Call his mother, who had been up all night — that was a fact, not a possibility, Ruth Carter had not slept and would not.
Police?
No. Whatever had happened here, going to the police as a Black man last seen running from six white men was not a thing he was going to do standing in torn clothes in a wood.
Home first. Everything after home.
The road turned up about forty minutes later, and it was the same road.
Same dirt, same washboard, same bend north where it went around the low ground. He had come out about a mile from where he’d gone in, and something in him unclenched slightly, because at least the world had the decency to be where he’d left it.
A Ford Fairlane came around the bend.
Samuel put his hand up and then immediately wondered whether he should have, standing on a county road at seven in the morning looking like something out of a ditch.
The car slowed.
The driver was a Black man in his fifties with his elbow out the window.
There was a white man in the back seat.
Samuel registered it and let it go — chauffeur, he thought, and thought nothing else about it, and it would be an hour and a half before that moment came back to him and turned over.
“Need a ride?”
“You headed to St. Louis?”
“County. But anything helps, right?”
Samuel reached for the rear door handle.
The white passenger looked up, startled.
“Front’s open,” the driver said, frowning slightly.
Samuel stopped with his hand on the handle.
“Right,” he said. “Right.”
He got in the front.
The driver looked at his clothes as he pulled back onto the road. “You get jumped?”
“Something like that.”
“White boys?”
And Samuel’s whole body went still, because that question, asked in that flat unbothered tone by a stranger in a car, was not a question anybody asked out loud.
The driver glanced over and laughed at his face. “Who else?”
Samuel stared at him.
“Henry,” the man said, putting a hand out sideways.
“Samuel.”
“Where you from, Samuel?”
“St. Louis.”
Henry drove another quarter mile.
“You sure?”
Samuel looked out the window at a landscape he had known his entire life.
“No,” he said.
Henry let him out near a filling station at a crossroads and leaned across the seat before he pulled off.
“Get yourself cleaned up. You look like death thought about it and changed its mind.”
Samuel almost smiled. “Appreciate the ride.”
The station was an ordinary station: two pumps, a bay, a Coca-Cola cooler out front sweating in the heat. Samuel started toward the restrooms on the near side of the building because he had blood on both hands and a face he did not want to be seen with.
The nearer door had a sign over it.
COLORED RESTROOMS
He stopped, because the near door — the good one, the one on the paved side with the light over it — was not the one that said that. It never was.
He looked toward the back of the building, where the second door was, around the corner, past the trash barrels.
UNCOLORED
Samuel stood in the gravel and read it four times.
A Black attendant came out of the bay wiping his hands on a rag.
“You need something?”
Samuel pointed. “Why’s it say that?”
“Say what?”
“ Uncolored. ”
The man’s face closed up. “Because that’s the uncolored restroom. Where else they supposed to go?”
“What does that mean?”
“You drunk?”
“No, sir.”
“Hit your head?”
Samuel thought about it seriously. “Maybe.”
He turned all the way around, taking in the crossroads, the road signs, the water tower off east with the town’s name on it.
“Where am I?”
“Missouri.”
“St. Louis?”
“County.”
“What year is it?”
The attendant took a step back and did not answer for a second.
“Fifty-five.”
“Nineteen fifty-five.”
“Yeah.”
Samuel looked back at the two signs.
Same year. Same state. Same water tower with the same name on it.
The attendant shook his head and started back toward the bay. “Whatever happened to you, friend, get somewhere and sleep it off before somebody sees you.”
He walked toward the city because he did not know what else to do with himself, and the city came apart around him one piece at a time.
The first bus nearly put him under a truck.
It came past him at the county line stop and Samuel stepped off the curb without looking, because he had turned to watch it and could not make his eyes report correctly. Black passengers filled the front two-thirds. White passengers sat behind them, quiet, looking out the windows, in the seats over the wheel wells where the ride is worst.
A horn went off and somebody swore at him and Samuel got back up on the sidewalk and stood there until the bus was out of sight.
Then a restaurant, four blocks on.
COLORED ENTRANCE , in gold leaf, on the front door under the awning.
UNCOLORED ENTRANCE , painted on a board, down the side alley by the kitchen.
A Black police officer was directing traffic at the intersection of Grand, in a pressed uniform, with the absolute unhurried authority of a man who has never once in his life had to wonder whether he’d be obeyed. Two white men in work clothes waited on his signal. When he waved them through, one of them nodded to him and said something respectful and kept his eyes down while he did it.
Samuel’s heart had started going.
A Black man came out of a bank on the corner in a suit that had been made for him — Samuel knew enough about clothes to know the difference — and a white deliveryman coming the other way with a hand truck stepped off the sidewalk into the gutter to let him pass, and neither of them acknowledged that anything had happened, because from where they stood nothing had.
Samuel stopped walking and stood in the middle of a sidewalk he had walked a thousand times.
Same buildings. Same streetcar tracks. Same Chevrolets and Fords and the same Bulova sign over the jeweler’s. Same August heat coming up off the same pavement.
The city was exactly where he had left it, down to the crack in the curb outside the shoe repair.
Only the country had changed.