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upright. For hours he’d play, his face stern and his clothes sweat-heavy. Folks would jam into the tiny halls, their bodies full of heat, and Eli would shut his eyes and feel their swell in the back of his mouth, their beating feet in his throat.
    Rumor had spread about the devil bag he kept at his waist, and after a set, there’d always be some desperate woman waiting for him outside. She’d tell him her troubles, and he’d listen—his face a blank, lost in the hiss of the gas lamps.
    When she finished speaking, he’d look her square in the eye.
    You got to be sure, he’d say, his hand laying warm across the back of hers. ’Cause once it gets doing, can’t get undone.
    Then he’d take her money and walk her back to someplace dark and quiet where they would not be disturbed.

    IN THE DAYS AFTER THE flood, it was so calm you could see clear through the water like it was a sheet of glass—torn-up roofs, stovepipes, drowned livestock made stiff and waxen. The D.C. men had come down on special order and they went around in their standard-issue tan, speaking in clean soft voices, sketching their plans on rolls of yellow paper. At night they went into the refugee camps, their lanterns flashing and disappearing through the weeds. They went to the coloreds first, rousting them from their beds with promises of work and food and a chance to help their country. And then there was Eli who was already up, who never slept much to begin with—Eli with his mouth on the mouth of a bottle of corn whiskey. He was by the fire, shooting craps—the dice heavy with mercury and firing sevens.
    He didn’t see the D.C. men, didn’t see them come up till one of them put a hand on his shoulder.
    You serving your country now.
    In the morning, they lined him up with the others and gave them each a ration ticket. They fed them on stores of stiff bread and a thin soup before driving them up-country to the levee camp. It was a wide and grassless clearing set along the water break, where rows of pup tents crowded into one another. The latrines were a network of shallow trenches running through the camp and out into the water. The mosquitoes raged thick and black, flitting on their eyes and skin and shit.
    They gathered the men to the water’s edge and one of the D.C. men stood himself up on a supply truck and sketched out what needed doing: a berm, ten feet high, six feet across, running two miles downriver. The work would be hard and long, but their work would live on in the state for years to come, he said.
    Then someone asked, How long we got to live here?
    And the man said, Long as it takes.
    Then they were given shovels.

    THE MAN IN CHARGE WAS a former overseer named Homer Teague. He wasn’t from D.C., but he’d run a plantation somewhere roundabout Indianola, and the D.C. men had figured that running coloreds is running coloreds. Teague was a fierce drinker. When he was angry, his face would turn wine red, and he’d uncoil that long bullwhip he kept at his belt and snap it in the air. If you didn’t shovel or haul fast enough, he’d pull you out of your line, and stretch you out under a tree and tear you through with a piece of splintered hickory.
    He lived out with his sister, Emaline, in a plantation house outside of town, a creaking place where the walls looked like bone and the stink of sulfur came up through the mud. It was always on his boots, kissing yolky daggers into the earth.
    Maybe it was the difference in their ages, but where her brother was mean and quick to anger, Emaline was gentle and easily moved to emotion. She was sixteen years old, a bird of a child. Some days, she’d come down to the camp done up in her gingham homespun, toting a basket of apples for the men.
    Eli would greet her as she came down the line. Unlike the others, Eli wasn’t afraid of smiling at white women, big and toothy, full of nothing behind it. He’d bow, tipping some