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the other side. I saw it coming. Boyd didn’t. He was working on his supper and maybe thought Daddy was going to piss or something. Daddy took hold of Boyd’s chair and pulled it straight back—with one hand—and turned it, so he was looking down at Boyd. All I could see was Boyd’s back and Daddy’s face and shoulders, but I could feel it in Boyd’s spine, coming at me like a radio signal: let me tell you, he knew now. Daddy pulled him up from the chair with his left hand and turned him so his back was to the wall. I guess so Boyd wouldn’t fall on me and my plate, waste all that food. Maybe break my nose. Then he hit him. With his fist, Willie. Coming up from way down. Sounded like a bat hitting a softball. Not quite a baseball, but a new hard softball. Old Boyd hit the wall and went down on the floor. He could still see and hear, but not much, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to move. ‘Boyd,’ Daddy said, ‘we don’t say that word in this house. You want to talk like poor white trash, you know where you can find them. Maybe they’ll even take you in.’ Then he went back to his chair and finished his supper. Old Boyd got up and went on to bed. And that man—my daddy—went to school for seven years. That’s it. Seventh-grade education. After that he stayed home and worked with his daddy on the farm.”
    Then Percy smiled and, oblivious of Willie’s glare, his taut face, held Willie’s bicep.
    â€œWillie, I bet anytime old Boyd starts to say that word his jaw shuts him up, it starts hurting so bad.” Maybe then he noticed Willie’s face. He withdrew his hand, and looked at me, a friendly look, and at Willie again. “Hell, you know what I’m trying to say. A Southerner—a real one, mind you, not one of them no-counts doesn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, and doesn’t respect anybody or anything because he doesn’t even respect himself, but a real Southerner—respects the South. Loves the South. And that means”—he looked at me—“Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis, Mo bile—” Then he winked at me, smiled, lightly punched my rigid arm, and said: “We don’t count Mi ami .”
    His right hand with the drink swept away from me, past Willie’s chest, as though turning Percy’s head to face Willie. Willie gazed into his eyes. Gazed, not glared, and I believed (and still do) that Willie was seeing sharply every detail of Percy’s face, hearing every inflection of his voice, and was also seeing and feeling too the years he had been carried and shoulder-pushed, then crawled and then walked as a Negro in America, and seeing as well the years beyond these minutes with Percy, the long years ahead of him and Louisa and Jimmy and his children still to come.
    â€œAnd Rome and Lafayette,” Percy said. “All the little towns Yankees like to poke fun at, little towns with decent people making do. And the farms and hills and swamps and, by God, mountains. But Willie—” Again he raised his glass, pointed the forefinger at Willie’s nose or mouth or between his eyes. “What the Southerner respects most, and that’s why we took on the Yankees in a war, is the individual. The individual as part of a whole way of life. We respect a man’s right to work for his family, put a roof over their heads, whether it’s a Goddamn mansion or a little old shotgun house on a patch of ground wouldn’t make a decent-size parking lot. And to raise his kids as he sees fit. Believe it or not, and by God I hope I’m helping you believe it, the Southerner most of all wants to leave people alone. And be left alone. Hell, that’s why my family and everybody I know down there’s always voted Republican. Tell you something else too, since we’ve gone this far. Slavery was a bad thing. Everybody knows that. But there’s