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street together in one version of the story; in another, the young man beckons to her on the dance floor and she joins him and someone tells my uncle. What does it matter? We never saw her again.
    I once tried to write a novel based in part on this situation, but I couldn’t imagine the life of my cousin afterward, when the African American community took her in, recognizing her as a casualty of the same ugly racism they knew so well. I knew nothing of that life. It was a historical novel; no, worse, a costume drama. I could outfit the characters with garb and accents, always careful to avoid, offset, or subvert stereotypes, but I knew nothing of the ways, the understandings, the culture of black people in that place and time but what I could glean from books, magazines, and the Internet. It was all a put-up job and I abandoned it, having discovered that I was a liberal in the worst sense: I wrote my black characters just like all the other people I knew, white people. I wrote them in blackface.
    How could it have been that I grew up in the industrial heartland and in a blue-collar neighborhood of mostly steel-workers and autoworkers—and still I knew no black people. How can that be? The answer to that question lies in the deeply internalized segregation that was the geographical expression of the hatred that had taken my cousin from us. Perhaps it was a liberation for her.
    And I realize now, writing this, that my awful vision of Veronica alone and desperate and defeated is the American nightmare, generated and sustained by white supremacists like my uncle.
    And my grandfather. My grandfather and his watermelon—it’s a summer memory from 1954 or ’55. My grandfather sits in his black leather chair by the window onto the alley, his cane hung over one arm of the chair where some of the horsehair stuffing is visible through a brown tear in the leather. Not long before, I’d had my hand slapped for pulling some of the long bristles from the slit. Now, Bobby and I are sitting cross-legged on the floor at my grandfather’s feet in his high-top, lace-up shoes before half a watermelon and a long knife on newspaper. We’re not allowed to handle the knife. My grandfather gives us each a slice of the melon and we watch as he eats his, making exaggerated sounds of delight,
Mmmm, mmmmnnnn.
After each bite, he spits the seeds out the window, which is shocking and comic and, we know, forbidden. Our grandmother would not approve. Five or six years old—I don’t believe we’d started school— we love this moment. We’re Pappy’s trusted coconspirators, although we can’t wait to run and tell someone, “Pappy spit the seeds out the window! Pappy spit the seeds out the window!” And as he does, he says, “Get out of here, black nigger!”
Too-ey!
“Get out of here, black nigger!” over and over.
    Bobby and I do it, too, laughing so hard we almost choke. We both know we must not swallow the seeds; a watermelon will grow in your stomach. It isn’t easy to spit out only the seeds. Bobby has bits of the pink flesh down his chin and I haven’t mastered it, either. To be sure to get the seeds out the window we stick our heads out. Bobby can’t say his L’s— later he will get after-school help with this—so he says, “Outta here, byack nicker. Outta here, byack nicker.” We mimic our grandfather, laughing and chanting and spitting till the melon is a pile of ribs next to the knife on the newspaper. Our hands, our chins, our forearms are sticky with drying juice.
    Once when I’d asked him about Joanne, my father said that the last he’d heard of her, somebody had said she was pushing a baby in a carriage. “The baby was white,” he added. “It was a white baby!” He shook his head as if to say that my uncle had been mistaken, which made me wonder if Joanne’s banishment had been a response to a pregnancy, and