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From Highway 64, you’d turn right onto Fishlake Road and follow its winding trail, past shacks and shotgun houses, until the main road ended. That’s as far as most ever went. Yet, those seeking the Peaces, Tysons, and Redfields made a ninety-degree turn onto a dirt path mules and wagons had carved out, and continued on, several hundred yards, passing first the Tysons’, then the Redfields’, until suddenly, far in the distance, the Peace home appeared.
    Gus and Chester Jr. built it months before Gus proposed to Emma Jean. He’d marry somebody, he assumed, and they’d need a place to live. Hopefully, she’d like it, but if she didn’t, she’d simply have to get used to it, he told Chester. Gus said that a man’s job was to provide a dwelling place for his wife; whether she liked it or not was her problem. Yet Gus hoped she would, and in fact she did. The full-length porch, stretching the width of the house, attracted her most as she imagined children, hopefully girls, leaping from it and into the yard, screaming and playing tag on hot summer afternoons. She envisioned herself in a porch rocker, on rainy days, mending holey socks while humming church songs to the rhythm of the downpour. She’d always wanted a porch. A porch invited people’s company, and that’s what she longed for.
    The rest of the house was fine with her. There were two bedrooms, a wash area, a sizeable kitchen, and a huge living room. When Emma Jean walked in, she gasped at the enormity of the living space and mentally began to decorateit. If she had a boy in the midst of her daughters, he’d sleep on the sofa. Boys didn’t mind that kind of thing, she told Gus.
    Emma Jean’s only insistence was that the house remain immaculate. She hated clutter and filth even more than Mae Helen had. Or maybe
because
Mae Helen had. For fifteen years, her Saturday morning chores included cleaning up behind her mother and sisters, and she would kill a man—children, too!—if they thought she was going to do more of that. Of course she would clean, she told Gus, but she wasn’t a maid and didn’t intend to feel like one. He nodded, but offered no assurances.
    Gus inherited the twenty-acre lot on which the house sat the day Chester Sr. died. He left Chester Jr. thirty acres north of the Jordan. Gus’s land was deeper in the woods and he preferred it that way. Once the house was complete, a hundred yards off the wagon path, he combed the nearby forest for wild ferns, flowers, and other greenery, which he then uprooted and transplanted to his own front yard. The result was a lush, colorful oasis the likes of which Emma Jean had never seen. Each spring, when the rains came and Gus escaped to the Jordan, ferns burst forth and flowers of every color bloomed and peppered the lawn. Gus was meticulous in its maintenance, beating Authorly severely whenever he mowed across something he thought was a weed. People complimented Emma Jean on her horticultural skills, and she accepted the praise, for both her own and Gus’s sakes.
    Gus liked that his picturesque lawn contrasted with what he called the ugliness of the adjoining cotton field. As a child, he promised Chester Sr. that none of his children would ever pick cotton a day in their lives. If he had to work like a mule to provide for his family, that’s exactly what he’d do. And it’s exactly what he did. Kissing white folks’ asses by picking their cotton was simply out of the question. So when he inherited the twenty acres and his boys started coming, he taught them how to work and, with their assistance, he kept his promise.
    Wilson Peace, Gus’s grandfather, had done the same thing. He refused to slave for white folks, and, even in the winter of 1907, when his family practically starved to death, he forbade any of them to bring white money into his house. That’s the winter Chester Sr. resolved not to emulate his father. His hunger had been far greater than his pride, so the day he turned eighteen,