"You think those two boys really going to hike up Cloverdale and ride down on those contraptions?"

"Not all the way down," said Madeline. "One of them always falls off and gets bloody or sprained or something."

"They a special way to walk for that?"

"Jaunty," said Ura Lee. "Those boys looking sneaky."

"Ah," said Madeline.

"Ah? That's all you got to say?"

Madeline sighed. "I already raised Cecil's four older brothers and not one of them in jail."

"Not one in college, either," said Ura Lee. "Not to criticize, just observing."

"All of them with decent jobs and making money, and Antwon doing fine."

Antwon was the one who was buying rental homes all over South Central and making money from renting week-to-week to people with no green card so they couldn't make him fix stuff that broke. The kind of landlord that Ura Lee had been trying to get away from when she saved up and bought this house in Baldwin Hills when the real estate market bottomed out after the earthquake.

They'd had this argument before, anyway. Madeline thought it made all the difference in the world that Antwon was exploiting Mexicans. "They got no right to be in this country anyway," she said. "If they don't like it, they can go home."

And Ura Lee had answered, "They came here cause they poor and got no choice, except to look for something better wherever they can find it. Just like our people getting away from share-cropping or whatever they were putting up with in Mississippi or Texas or Carolina, wherever they were from."

Then Madeline would go off on how people who never been slaves got no comparison, and Ura Lee would go off on how the last slave in her family was her great-great-grandmother and then Madeline would say all black people were still slaves and then Ura Lee would say, Then why don't your massuh sell you off stead of listening to you bitch and moan. Then it would start getting nasty.