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nodded, as if he had asked her a question, and without looking at him. “Yeah. You best to be gettin’ on.”
    INEZ, NORTH CAROLINA
    JULY, 1874
    Queen Marie had learned to cope with his dalliances: the many women, wealthy and poor, black, white, and Cherokee, married, widowed, and single; even his wife, she tried to persuade herself, was a mere dalliance. Prince belonged to her—Queen Marie felt this. He had been the stuff of her teenage dreams, the loping knight in shining black armor come to save her from the boredom of chastity. Surely he would recognize the truth in time: He belonged to her, as she belonged to him.
    She had learned also to wait, with the forbearance of Job waiting for his returns from these dalliances, and welcoming him every time with the affection she had quickly learned that he required. For two years she had waited in the boardinghouse upstairs from a barroom, waiting nervously and praying and hoping against expectation that today would be the day that he would come back again as he always had before, sometimes broken by his wife’s rebuff, sometimes drunken and cheerful, wearing pink or red or mocha lipstick on his shirt or on his thigh as he lifted her and spun her in the air. For two years she had loved him and forgiven him, reminding herself that he would come around in time. For two of her seventeen years she had barely spoken with her mother, a dignified widow who lived in a hard-earned house not far from town, close to the white folks. Her devotion to him had been costly. She loved him all the more for this.
    Her rivals were many but manageable. She had persuaded herself of this, and become almost indifferent to the myriad women whose doors he darkened; except for his wife. She had not met the bony old hag, but had heard of her piety and pride.
    “I don’t see what you need wit’ her,” she had told him more than once as they lay entangled and satiated, diagonally across her bed in the boardinghouse above the barroom. “Bet she don’t do this,” she had often urged while demonstrating some erotic proficiency that she had perfected under his instruction. “Or this,” she whispered on darkened dance floors or in a smoke-filled billiard hall. He never confirmed the wisdom of her wager, only stared uncomfortably ahead or changed the subject whenever she brought up his wife, or questioned his reasons for clinging, as if for survival, to the hope of his coming reconciliation to her.
    For he believed that it would come: the day when he would come home to find his wife compliant and ready to love him with the singlemindedness and ardor that she had never demonstrated consistently, but that he believed her capable of rendering. He had told Queen Marie of this, and others of his dreams, babbling drunk and only half-coherent, on the morning they had met at the holiness church.
    She had come with Dottie, her closest friend and only ally at Bull Swamp’s one-room school, where her peers had openly scorned her while they secretly envied her brilliance: She was gifted, and was going to be a poet the likes of which Negroes had not produced since Wheatley. Her mother, who took in sewing, made her bright pink and yellow dresses tied with ribboned sashes, and bound her jet black hair with bows to match. This drew the envy of the other girls, whose hand-me-down cotton dresses had been pilfered or inherited from the families of former slave masters.
    The white teacher had fawned on her from the beginning, coaxing and praising her, urging the talent that, in a short time, would bring her the accolades of her elders and the envy of her peers. She had taken extra assignments in reading, writing, and public speaking, creating phrases and sentences, then finally prose, melodic and lilting and beautiful, lofty and soaring, or scathing and provocative, while the other children struggled with letters and words.
    Her mother’s business had become increasingly lucrative and consuming, and as she reached her