sensed the very first moment she had met Lloyd: that here was someone lonelier than she, lonelier than she would ever be. A creature so different, not by markings or skin color, or anything anyone could definitely see, but by who he was inside. He could not just run away to find a better part of the world to live in; he would have to invent his own world if he was to survive. He might have to invent many worlds—so many that he might end up forgetting which were his creations.
“You’ll be something nobody’s ever thought of, Lloyd,” she answered.
“But I want to be with you!” he wailed, and she had to stifle his plea with her warm hand.
“Shush. Don’t you be ruinin’ things now. You gotta buck up and be strong. That’s what bein’ a man is. I’d want to be with you, too, if life would let me—but it won’t, so there’s no use cryin’.”
As she said this, the Zanesville prodigy saw that the older girl was working very hard to restrain her tears. She has enough to cry about, he thought to himself. No need for me to make her sadder still.
It was the first time in his life that Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd had ever had such a sentiment about another person, and the novelty of it took him by surprise. He reached out and embraced her, with a firmness and a tenderness that made even the resourceful runaway tremble inside.
“One day I’ll come find you,” Lloyd said, and to Hattie these words hung in the tight, cramped air like a melody on the thumb piano. There was nothing more to be said on the subject of the future and their different destinies, for those words, uttered with complete calm and conviction, had done what every inspired melody does: condense a welter of emotions into an unconflicted clarity that one can instantly recall and call upon. Like a hierogram.
Those words gave Hattie the courage to seek a deeper hiding place when the Defiance landed at last at Independence. To Lloyd, she had given her abused body and something of her hidden soul while in transit together. In parting, she gave him her most prized possession—a token of the love she felt but could express only in deed. It was a tiny ivory skull, carved with gorgeous simple precision, with a hint of a smile. The size of a marble, it nonetheless contained an undeniable radiance. It had been given to her by her mother a few weeks before her death. The girl was told that the icon came from Africa and had been passed through many hands to reach her.
“Mama called it a fetish,” she told Lloyd. “She says it’s good luck agin enemies. It means Death smiles on you.”
Clutching the talisman in his own hand, Lloyd had no doubt that it held some unusual power, for it seemed to retain the vitality of all those who had held it before, and the suggestion of the smile imbued it with an eerie optimism, however grim its appearance.
The moment he cupped it, he was charged with a realization that had been waiting for him since birth. He, too, had black blood in his veins. Though it sometimes may have taken a light-skinned Negro to spot it, and this had often been to his advantage, he saw the truth, whole and clear. He remembered every taunt from the Zanesville hooligans he had ever heard. Every sidewise glance from the children in St. Louis. He was not a mongrel, for the Europeans he had encountered in the family travels were as mongrel a bunch as you could imagine. He was part white, part Indian, and part black, and each of those breeds carried its own unique burden and heritage, especially in the America of those times. Something in him connected back to Africa—to the dark magic and turmoil of that faraway continent. He felt the literal truth of this course through him when he gripped the skull. This was a piece of his own puzzle handed back. It daunted and augmented him all at once, and he placed it with extreme, gentle care deep in his little knapsack next to the box with the hierograms of the Martian Ambassadors, his uncle’s letter and map, and the always watching glass eyes of Mother Tongue.
Before Hattie, he had not had the wherewithal to look upon the Ambassadors’ box since leaving St. Louis. Now, nurtured by the girl’s devotion, he could and