into place. A moment later, the mysterious girl lit a small storm lantern that sat between them. The light flared up as if inside a cave.
“Smuggler’s hold,” the girl muttered. “Doan nobody know we’re here, so talk low.”
There was something about her voice or, rather, her way of speaking that perplexed Lloyd. He let his eyes suck in the surroundings, which were so near there was not much to see. A rough bedroll and a sack of food that smelled like cold mutton and boiled potato—their refuge was no more than a large mouse hole. Then the girl pulled off her cap and he let out a stifled sigh.
She was a Negro with milk-coffee skin and eyes that shone like the color of honeycomb in the lantern reflection. Her hair was not kinky, puffed, or nappy like that of other dark girls he had seen but straight and tinged a rich cinnamon shade, clipped as though she had taken a pair of pinking shears to her head without a mirror. She smelled a little—or perhaps it was the mutton—but her teeth were clean and white, her nose sleek and narrow. He guessed her age to be about twelve, although it was hard to tell. Thirteen, maybe. He knew that she was taller than he, but there was a womanly cast to her face despite the hardened scowl she affected and the boyish clothes she wore—a rough cotton tow shirt under a mussel-blue fisherman’s jacket and loose britches that looked as if they were stitched out of some old curtain. The garments smelled of smoke and sweat, and the moist, greasy air of the boat. Her feet were bare, the soles as pale as butter.
“Why you gwain jump?” she demanded, and then cleared her throat.
Lloyd tried to think, but all he could do was stare at her.
“You crazy or you in trouble?”
The way she said this was different. Her speech seemed to shift between dialects.
“You can talk. I heard you. Whatchyou lookin’ at?”
Lloyd had never felt so lost for words.
“What’s your name?”
This question was delivered with a steeled self-assurance.
“Are you scared?”
She sounded almost solicitous now, with the tone of fine breeding. He could imagine a wealthy white girl fondling the family cat, yet inches away from him was a Negro filly in sooty boy’s garb with grown-up eyes and a soft, full mouth. He tried to look away but could not bring himself to do it.
“Worried ’bout bein’ with a nigger?” she challenged, and her whole bearing seemed to change again.
“Who … are … you?” Lloyd managed at last, and felt reassured to be able to speak.
“Wailll …” she smirked. “Dey calls me Shoofly.” She flashed her white teeth in a mocking way and then, in sharp finishing-school diction, added, “But I call myself Hattie. As in Henrietta LaCroix. That’s my proper name.”
Her posture and tone had shifted again, becoming haughty and cool, educated even. He could not control his gaze. The brassy glint of her high cheekbones, the buttermilk soles of her feet—everything confused him, and the thought of leaping into the river was as lost as something he had thrown overboard.
“That’s … a fine … name,” he gurgled, realizing to his mortification that he was becoming aroused between his legs.
The girl gave a slight snort and rolled her filbert-shaped eyes. “I don’t need the likes of you to tell me that,” she said, as her hands whisked out faster than he could move and zipped the skullcap from his head.
His hair was dirty and matted and, as good as it always felt to take off the cap, he felt naked now and was all the more embarrassed about his incipient erection. What made matters worse was that he had the sudden impression that the girl was drawing some disdainful conclusion about him. He had sensed this attitude from Negroes and mulattoes a few times before, and now the way she regarded him he could almost look back through her eyes, like a reversible lens, to each of those incidents, silent little moments of conspiratorial reckoning—sometimes condescending, other times rudely compassionate, and always happening at the speed of a glance. In her weird honeycomb eyes, he knew that he looked like trash.
“You’re beautiful,” he choked at last, and was instantly sorry he had said it.
The girl made a mute pucker with her lips and her face flared like copper under a flame, but she did not move.
“Like niggers, huh?” She squinted, putting on her poor, shiftless voice again.