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she have reacted had I announced that I was on my way to visit Dachau or Buchenwald to pay my respects to the millions who had perished there while doing the boogaloo and snapping my fingers?
    Our association ended shortly thereafter.
     
     
     
    B y now the runaway part of my mind has reached the end of the James River. The sixty-mile run down from Richmond is over, and I’ve finally reached historic Jamestown as well as Point Comfort, the name given to the actual landing site of that first band of English settlers in 1607. A dozen years later, Point Comfort would also, ironically,
be the place where the first “scrambles” of a sort took place. The captain of a Dutch three-master, a consignment of “twenty-and-odd negroes” (lowercase “n”) in the hold of his ship, put them up for sale at Point Comfort. The exact provenance of the group was uncertain. It’s unlikely that they were directly from “the kingdoms of Africa”—since, at the time, the trade in chattel cargo was routed mainly from West Africa to Brazil and the Caribbean archipelago. In all likelihood the “twenty-and-odd” were probably transshipments from a Caribbean island or former property of some bankrupt West Indian planter that had been peddled up the archipelago until the Dutch ship finally reached the Atlantic shoreline and Jamestown. In any event, they were immediately put up for sale at Point Comfort. No money as such changed hands. The Dutch ship being low on provisions, the chattel were exchanged for so many sacks of corn, beans and oats, so many barrels of smoked and salted meat. The exchange concluded, the “twenty-and-odd” were quickly led off to the monumental work awaiting them as well as the eight million like them who would follow over the centuries.

    “ L aborDay.”
    Startled, my friend Virginia looks over at me. I’ve broken our silence again. A few minutes earlier, we had been discussing where to have a leisurely holiday lunch in downtown Richmond. Once that was decided, we had fallen silent, each of us privately taking leave of the river and the last of the morning.
    “Seems to me this particular holiday needs to be more inclusive in whom it acknowledges.”
    “Paule . . . ?”
    “All those centuries of hard back, donkeywork done gratis. When I think of that . . .”
    Troubled by my tone, my friend sits around to face me fully on our stone ottoman. Virginia’s face. To all appearances, it is a white woman’s face. In my friend’s complex genealogy, white has seemingly overwhelmed all the black in her DNA. On her maternal family tree, there had been a German grandmother, a cook in a well-to-do, late-nineteenth-century New York household, who fell in love with the family’s black coachman recently up from Amelia County, Virginia. Her paternal line reaches even farther back to the son of one of
the antebellum’s wealthiest planters. The family still ranks among today’s F.F.V.s, the First Families of Virginia, that is, the true aristocracy. Their long-ago son also figured in the whiteness that dominates my friend’s bloodline. But only physically. Only in appearance.
    Certainly not in Virginia’s mind, heart and reading of history. Indeed, occupying a place of honor in her living room is a lovingly preserved, dim little snapshot of an elderly couple seated in front of a shotgun house that is as old and weathered as they are. The man’s long John Henry legs seem to extend beyond the picture’s frame, while his aged wife has clearly passed down, intact, her small, sinewy body to my friend. The couple are a Southern Gothic, and they are both as black as me. They are Virginia’s great-grandparents on her mother’s side, once chattel labor; then sharecroppers, once they were freed.
    Virginia had taken the picture with her box camera once when visiting them as a teenager.
    The snapshot of the old couple always reminds me of my West Indian grandmother, whose history was not all that different. There was a
small,