The steep price paid for one night on a beach with a boy

The trapper struggles to hold on to something that seems almost as elusive as the wolves they pursue: the chance to make a life out of wilderness

We got a sayin’, “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” which is usually meant as a compliment. To my mind, it also refers to the delectable treats we as a people harvested for our owners and for our own selves all these many years, slave or free.

Always plenty of good food and wine. The four of us at the table take turns uncorking new bottles. We drink out of water glasses the way they do in the old country.

            The fear begins to subside as soon as I’m out of town. The speed of the open road should cause greater fear, but the whir of the engine lulls me into a false sense of safety.

It was an old document. Rough parchment, yellowed and withered. I was all of 10, on the threshold of womanhood, digging in my mother’s closet, trying to find clues about why my mother abandoned me when I was an infant, why she returned to claim me when I was 9. On this sweltering, summer day, I found a treasure trove of documents—birth certificates, Social Security cards with various names, paycheck stubs and blurred photographs of my mother with strangers.

Last Thursday, one of those gray, fall days when the starlings gather up and string between the elms around here, my children’s mother–dead 10 years–walked into a pastry shop where I was buttering a croissant. 

Several years ago at an elementary-school Christmas play in upstate New York, I sat behind three fourth-graders from the most remote and poorest section of the rural school district. In all likelihood the boys had never seen an actual African-American person except on television and on rare trips to Kingston, 40 miles away.

"The day my grandfather saw the naked woman began at dawn."

When I handed her the phone, Laura looked like I was taking her to the dentist. Her father was in town and threatened to come over. I had met the guy twice.