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deep-brown skin was filmed slightly with perspiration that reddened it. When she was thoughtful or when she was unaware of being observed, her face seemed deeply sad, as if she knew there was no hope, in the long run, for anyone in the world, and that whatever she was doing at the time was destined for a short, if perfect, life. When she smiled, as she did often when talking to her friends, this look of anticipated doom was almost wiped away, though traces of it always lingered in the depths of her eyes.
    She was never thought of as a pretty girl. People might say she looked interesting, mysterious, older than her years and therefore intriguing, but she was considered approaching beautiful only when she looked sad. When she laughed, this beauty broke; and people, captivated by the sad quality of her face, seemed compelled to joke with her just long enough to cause her to laugh and lose it. Then, freed from their interest in her, they walked away. After these encounters, her mouth still quivering and contracting from her laughter of a moment before, she would curl her toes and stand on one foot, leaning like a crane into the space around her, rocked by the thump-thump of her bewildered—and, she felt then, rather stupid—heart.
    Anne-Marion, seeing this happen too frequently to Meridian without anything being learned from it, always felt the urge, at the point where Meridian leaned on one foot, to rush forward and kick her.
    Now Meridian strained upward on her toes in an effort to improve her view, but could see nothing beyond the milling about of the people at the gate.
    “That flaky bastard,” said Anne-Marion, her dark eyes flashing. “That mother’s scum is going to turn us around.”
    “He wouldn’t,” said Meridian mildly.
    “You wait and see. He’s scared of us causing a commotion that could get in the cracker papers, just when he’s fooled ’em that Saxon Knee-grows are finally your ideal improved type.”
    Anne-Marion wiped her brow and heaved the coffin more firmly against her cheek.
    “He ain’t nothing but a dishrag for those crackers downtown. He can’t stand up to’em no more than piss can fall upward. His mama should’ve drowned him in the commode the minute he was born.”
    “Leave folks’ mamas alone,” said Meridian, although Anne-Marion made her smile. She was relieved that the line had begun, slowly, to move again. Wile Chile was getting heavier with each pause. Soon they were abreast of the guards at the gate. “Hey, brother,” she called to the good-looking one.
    “Y’all gon’ run into trouble,” he called back nonchalantly.
    It still surprised her to see a black man wearing a uniform and holstered gun. What was he protecting? she wondered. If he was protecting the campus, how silly that was, because nobody would ever dare harm the lovely old campus buildings; and he couldn’t be protecting the students, because they were only just now coming onto the campus, following the six young women who sweated under the casket (which they had paid for) that held The Wild Child’s body; and he couldn’t be afraid of the crowd of Wile Chile’s neighbors, whose odors and groans and hymns drifted up to them pungent with poverty and despair. Humbly, they were bringing up the rear.
    Anne-Marion, having given up on winning over the guards long ago, refused now even to look at them. She could not see policemen, guards and such. “I have uniform blindness,” she explained.
    The street outside the gate was ordinary enough, with patched potholes and a new signal light just in front of the gate. The fence that surrounded the campus was hardly noticeable from the street and appeared, from the outside, to be more of an attempt at ornamentation than an effort to contain or exclude. Only the students who lived on campus learned, often painfully, that the beauty of a fence is no guarantee that it will not keep one penned in as securely as one that is ugly.
    A dampness peculiar to the climate was