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the wagon had pulled away, I raised my head and looked back at the sheriff, who was looking down at the ground where my father had stood, as if something should have been there, something he could’ve picked up and carried away. I couldn’t see anything except the strength that had been my daddy lying there in the road. Sheriff Reynolds never moved, like he wasn’t even breathing. But then I saw his chest begin to go out and in as we rode away. It must’ve been hard for that man to go so long without taking a breath.
    I didn’t breathe too much either till we got home.
    Later I found out that even if Daddy had been allowed into that courthouse, it wouldn’t have mattered. He didn’t have the money to pay the poll tax or the book learning to pass the literacy test.

    The sheriff knew that. All those white people gathered on the steps of the courthouse knew it. For Daddy it wasn’t about paying for something. He figured he’d already paid. And it wasn’t about whether he could read or write. It was about justice. He once told me that if you had to ask for something that was already yours, then you’d given it up. Up to that day Daddy behaved as if he believed he had rights, but he died outside that courthouse trying to claim what nobody should have to ask for.
    There’s one thing colored people in the South have in common with the dead. The dead have no rights. Maybe Daddy knew that all along.

The Horse’s Paces Walk, Trot, and Canter
    The rider should always have a light feeling of the reins; and when
the horse bears hard on the bit, keep the hand steady, use both legs,
which, by bringing his haunches under him, will oblige the horse
to take his weight off your hand.
    from Cavalry Tactics

    grandma sara
    O ld. Young. The way a river is old and young. Grandma Sara had eyes like that. Eyes that looked through you like you were a window and she could plainly see what was on the other side, even if you couldn’t see a thing. You had to ask her about yourself, cause sooner or later you realized you didn’t know yourself till she began talking to you. You were a language she used to speak to the dead. How far away her eyes, like stars at night, like the moon in daylight. Always smoking tobacco, I remember smoke round her head. She was always in a cloud sitting there in her rocking chair.
    I got so’s I knew what was coming when she chose to talk to me, and it was never easy. She was old and bent like an oak’s old and bent. She still had grit enough to kill me dead, but she said she loved me, which was why she so hard. Like one time when I was maybe fifteen years old, and she woke up to find me sitting on the floor a few feet away from her chair. My chin was buried in my hands, and I probably looked like I was praying. Anyone talking to God was bound to raise Grandma Sara’s interest.
    When I peered up at her, the morning sun shone behind her head. She looked like God, if God had been a Black Seminole woman, but when Grandma asked you a question, well, there wasn’t much difference between the two.
    “What you doin, boy?” she said.
    “Nothin, ma’am,” I murmured.
    “Don’t ‘nothin’ me, boy,” she spat back. “You fifteen years old now, and that’s old enough for all kinds of trouble.” She paused briefly. “Maybe you workin yourself up to go back to that courthouse and finish what your daddy started?”

    I wondered how that woman could see my heart so clearly when sometimes I couldn’t even feel it.
    “No, ma’am,” I muttered through my fingers. “I mean, I know I should get that out of my head, but I can’t forget how that sheriff looked at Daddy. What he did should be against the law, and Sheriff Reynolds oughtta throw himself in jail for breakin the law!” My voice dropped down then like a bird that forgot what it was singing. I was also thinking bout Grandma Sara, how she’d been around even longer than Daddy and what kinda things must’ve happened to her, but I didn’t know how