The whites made the rules, but the rules kept changing. They were fluid, defined by circumstance and necessity, not by words on paper. Later, Louis would reflect that what was strangest of all was the fact that the white men and women who ran the town would always deny that they were racist. We don’t hate the coloreds, they would say, we just all get along better when they keep themselves to themselves. Or: they’re welcome in the town during the day, but we just don’t think they should spend the night. It’s for their own safety as much as ours. Curious. It was as hard then as it was now to find anybody who would admit to being a racist. Even most racists, it seemed, were ashamed of their intolerance.

But there were also those who wore such an epithet as a badge of honor, and the town had its share of such people as well. It was said that the trouble started when a group of local men threw a heavy pitcher filled with urine through the cracked old windshield of Errol’s truck, and Errol responded in kind. That temper of his, that fury that he kept bottled inside of him, had erupted, and he had tossed a length of two-by-four through the window of Little Tom’s bar in reprisal. That had been enough for them to act against him, that and their fear of what he represented. He was a black man who spoke better than most of the white people in the town. He owned his own truck. He could fix things with his hands-radios, TVs, air conditioners, anything that had a current flowing through it-and he could fix them better and cheaper than anyone else, so that even those who wouldn’t allow him to walk the town’s streets at night were happy to let him into their homes to fix their appliances during the day, even if some of them didn’t feel quite as comfortable in their living rooms afterward, although they weren’t racists either. They just didn’t like strangers in their home, particularly colored strangers. If they offered him water to slake his thirst, they were careful to present it to him in the cheap tin cup set aside for just such an eventuality, the cup from which no one else would drink, the cup kept with the cleaning products and the brushes, so that the water always had a faint chemical burn to it.