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because Aunt Clara counted on my not daring to. A sign on my mother’s face said, “Don’t feed the rugs.” Around the ancient Steinway was a deep ditch; another moat protected the famous organ in its nook of flocked paper. Even Aunt Clara seemed like an exhibit, part of the uncontrolled decor, a specimen in the menagerie of ceramic dog figurines.
    She grew up in a family that thought of itself as inhabiting a middle kingdom. Back in the days when white scholars argued that high yellows were the tares among the wheat, that were it not for frustrated mulattoes blacks would not agitate, it was consoling to think that the majority of whites lived and died under the curse of being “poor white trash.” Her mother believed that the Also Chosen should give to Jim Crow the subversive inflection that the custom of segregation shielded nice Negroes from the contamination of whites. But Aunt Clara was as obsessed as Thomas Jefferson with the “algebraical notation” of blood mixture.
    Aunt Clara’s grandfather was a “boss mechanic,” a carpenter, blacksmith, and wheelwright known by his nickname, “Handy.” Family memoirs said what a black family back then would want them to say: that he was “seven-eighths Caucasian and possibly one-eighth Negro,” would never consent to be whipped, and didn’t know who his parents were.
    Aunt Clara’s Uncle Sterling claimed that when he worked as a “shaver,” an errand boy, after the Civil War he overheard a Union colonel who considered himself an expert on nigger trading say, “The mother of that boy’s father was a beautiful white girl from one of our best families. It seemed to be a case of real love for a young mulatto, a trusted man, a servant. The child was taken away and sold as a slave and to this day the secret has
been kept.” Maybe Uncle Sterling trusted his memory when his white colleagues were hoodwinked by the story and urged him, a professor of religion, to write it down.
    Aunt Clara’s father, also called Handy, was born around 1856 in Roane County, east Tennessee. His mother had the “personal care” of the food repository, but after slavery, Uncle Sterling, the author of the memoir, was capable of saying, “their best years were behind them.” Three of thirteen children survived. They went the folkloric seventy-five miles on foot for the chance to go to college. Walk, believer, walk.
    After Clark University and the Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Handy settled in Opelika, as presiding elder of the Methodist Church and friend of day laborers and sharecroppers who had driven their herds from the border states at night, which meant that the cows were probably stolen. He published inspirational allegories about necromancers, “Mr. Truth” and “Mr. Lie,” and was the bane of many a minister. His reports had the power to deprive them of their churches, to transfer them into oblivion. It was said he made even his bishop nervous.
    Aunt Clara was born in Opelika—in 1896 perhaps and at home certainly. She was always “molting her years,” trimming her age, my grandmother said. Her cards were already on the table, one of which foretold clouds of muslin, colored subdebs, and Clark University. “A lot of important people fell through chapel.”
    When Uncle Eugene began to court her, he’d walk her home to Avenue A. Finally, her mother sailed from the house and down the lawn: “You may call on her if you wish, young man, but you may not talk to her on the street.” When they married he was a shadow surgeon called in by white hospitals, strictly off the record, and had a lucrative side business in secretive cases: performing abortions on whites.
    The newlyweds orbited around her parents, and after the old folks were gone they demolished the house and took their time putting up an expanded version of the original. She and Uncle Eugene used their light skin to get what they wanted, which was mostly to enjoy the theater up North. Then Uncle Eugene