I sigh. The date’s been canceled twice already. I can only hope it’ll be put off again. And yet I’m flattered that Hilly has so much faith that someone like him would be interested in someone like me.

“Oh, and I need you to come on by and pick up these notes,” Hilly says. “I want my initiative in the next newsletter, a full page next to the photo ops.”

I pause.“The bathroom thing?” Even though it was only a few days ago that she’d brought this up at bridge club, I’d hoped it was forgotten.

“It’s called the Home Help Sanitation Initiative—William Junior you get down or I will snatch you baldheaded Yule May get in here—and I want it in this week.”

I am editor of the League newsletter. But Hilly is president. And she’s trying to tell me what to print.

“I’ll see. I don’t know if there’s room,” I lie.

From the sink, Pascagoula sneaks a look at me, as if she can hear what Hilly’s saying. I look over at Constantine’s bathroom, now Pascagoula’s. It’s off the kitchen. The door’s half open and I can see a tiny room with a toilet, a pull string flusher at the top, a bulb with a yellowing plastic shade. The small corner sink hardly holds a glass of water. I’ve never once been inside. When we were kids, Mother told us she’d spank us if we went in Constantine’s bathroom. I miss Constantine more than anything I’ve ever missed in my life.

“Then make room,” Hilly says, “because this is pretty darn important.”

CONSTANTINE LIVED ABOUT A MILE from our house, in a small Negro neighborhood called Hotstack, named after the tar plant that used to operate back there. The road to Hotstack runs along the north side of our farm, and for as long as I can remember, colored kids have walked and played along that mile stretch, kicking at the red dust, making their way toward the big County Road 49 to catch a ride.

I used to walk that hot mile myself, when I was a girl. If I begged and practiced my catechism, Mother would sometimes let me go home with Constantine on Friday afternoons. After twenty minutes of walking slow, we’d pass the colored five-and-dime store, then a grocer with hens laying in back, and all along the way, dozens of shacky-looking roadside houses with tin roofs and slanting porches, along with a yellow one that everybody said sold whiskey from the back door. It was a thrill to be in such a different world and I’d feel a prickly awareness of how good my shoes were, how clean my white pinafore dress that Constantine had ironed for me. The closer we got to Constantine’s house, the more she’d smile.

“Hi-do, Carl Bird,” Constantine’d holler at the root-selling man sitting in his rocking chair on the back of his pickup. Bags of sassafras and licorice root and birdeye vine sat open for bargaining, and by the time we poked around those a minute, Constantine’s whole body’d be rambling andloose in the joints. Constantine wasn’t just tall, she was stout. She was also wide in the hips and her knees gave her trouble all the time. At the stump on her corner, she would stick a pinch of Happy Days snuff in her lip and spit juice straight as an arrow. She’d let me look at the black powder in its round tin, but say, “Don’t tell your mama, now.”

There were always dogs, hollow-stomached and mangy, laid out in the road. From a porch a young colored woman named Cat-Bite would holler,“Miss Skeeter! Tell your daddy hey for me. Tell him I’s doing fine.” My own daddy gave her that name years ago. Drove by and saw a rabid cat attacking a little colored girl. “That cat near about ate her up,” Daddy’d told me afterward. He’d killed the cat, carried the girl to the doctor, and set her up for the twenty-one days of rabies shots.

A little farther on, we’d get to Constantine’s house. It had three rooms and no rugs and I’d look at the single photograph she had, of a white girl she told me she looked after for twenty years over in Port Gibson. I was pretty sure I knew everything about Constantine—she had one sister and grew up on a sharecropping farm in Corinth, Mississippi. Both her parents were dead. She didn’t eat pork as a rule and wore a size sixteen dress and a size ten ladies’ shoe. But I used to stare at the toothy smile of that child in the picture, a little jealous, wondering why she didn’t have a picture of me up too.

Sometimes two girls from next door would come over to play with me, named Mary Nell and Mary Roan. They were so black I couldn’t tell them apart and called them both just Mary.

“Be nice to the little colored girls when you’re down there,” Mother said to me one time and I remember looking at her funny, saying, “Why wouldn’t I be?” But Mother never explained.

After an hour or so, Daddy would pull up, get out, hand Constantine a dollar. Not once did Constantine invite him inside. Even back then, I understood we were on Constantine’s turf and she didn’t have to be nice to anybody at her own house. Afterward, Daddy would let me go in the colored store for a cold drink and sucking candy.

“Don’t tell your mama I gave Constantine a little extra, now.”

“Okay, Daddy,” I’d say. That’s about the only secret my daddy and I have ever shared.

THE FIRST TIME I was ever called ugly, I was thirteen. It was a rich friend of my brother Carlton’s, over to shoot guns in the field.

“Why you crying, girl?” Constantine asked me in the kitchen.