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you drip that water on the rug!”
    I found my mother inside folding clothes. In a rush I spit out the entire sordid story, my bare foot stomping in fury. After hearing that my sister and grandfather had stood by laughing as I nearly drowned, she simply continued to fold clothes. Brow furrowed, she lit a cigarette and expelled a stream of noxious gray smoke into the air before suggesting, “Don’t put the flippers back on, then.” I was dumbfounded and my feelings were hurt. I had expected to be fussed over. Instead, no one took my trauma seriously.
    Sometimes my grandfather would pass on bits of strange and highly suspect information to me, often involving the nature of feet. He had lots of time to think on these mysteries, as he spent most of his days sitting quietly in the flea market, waiting for someone to come and offer him a deal on some of his wares. He once obtained several large boxes of socks, which he proceeded to put on display. I hated those socks. There was nothing even remotely interesting about them. I strolled through the flea market inspecting all the other booths, which always held strange and fantastical devices. When you came to my grandfather’s booth there was nothing but a bunch of boring socks.
    I was eating my usual summertime lunch of a peanut butter and banana sandwich, and washing it down with a Scramble soda, when I started to suspect that all white people were as disdainful of those socks as I was. Every white person who approached the booth seemed to show no interest in the socks, and would almost turn their nose up if my grandfather attempted to draw their attention to his discount hosiery. I also noticed that almost every black person who happened past would buy at least one pair, sometimes several. This struck me as highly peculiar.
    “How come only black people are buying the socks?” I asked Ivan in between bites of sandwich. He eyed me over the rim of his cup as he took a sip of coffee. “Because they don’t want their feet to get cold,” he answered eventually. There seemed to be some deep mystery to me here. Was there some special reason they were being protective of their feet? Did white people not care if their feet got cold? I know that I myself was opposed to cold feet, yet I had no desire to purchase flea market socks.
    “Why?” I blurted in frustration. “Why don’t they want their feet to get cold?” He looked at me as if I had gone insane, frowned, and shook his head before answering with “Because if their feet get cold they die.” This was a stunning revelation. Now I was getting to the bottom of this thing. I was amazed, and wondered why no one had bothered to teach me this fact of life in school. I had one last question. “Will white people die if their feet get cold?” He chuckled, turned his back to me, and went about the business of trying to draw more customers. This conversation stuck with me for many years. I even told a guy on Death Row about it, and it became a running joke. When he was getting ready to go out into the yard on cold winter mornings, I’d yell over and remind him, “Make sure you’ve got your socks on. You know what happens when your feet get cold.” He’d laugh and say, “You and your old racist granddaddy ain’t going to trick me.”
    There was one other incident in my youth that involved my grandfather and socks. For some reason I couldn’t sleep without socks on. It just didn’t feel right. I would put on my pajama bottoms and tuck them into my socks. The socks had to be pulled up almost to my knees so that it looked like a bizarre superhero’s costume. The problem was that I often didn’t change the socks for three or four days at a time. I would howl in outrage if anyone caught me and forcibly pulled them off.
    This changed when my grandfather told me that sleeping with my socks on could cause my feet to burst open, because they weren’t getting any air. In my head I saw my toes exploding like kernels of popcorn. It