Free Paradise by Toni Morrison

back, to see them forcing themselves to look at the ground, the bright May sky or the length of their fingernails.
    Good was finished. Her belly hair could stand a light clipping—its knots were otherwise impossible—but she was beautiful. K.D. started on Ben’s coat, rehearsing his line of defense to Arnette’s family. When he described the incident to his uncles they had frowned at the same time. And like a mirror image in gestures if not in looks, Steward spit fresh Blue Boy while Deek lit a cigar. However disgusted both were, K.D. knew they would not negotiate a solution that would endanger him or the future of Morgan money. His grandfather had named his twins Deacon and Steward for a reason. And their family had not built two towns, fought white law, Colored Creek, bandits and bad weather, to see ranches and houses and a bank with mortgages on a feed store, a drugstore and a furniture store end up in Arnold Fleetwood’s pocket. Since the loose bones of his cousins had been buried two years ago, K.D., their hope and their despair, was the last male in a line that included a lieutenant governor, a state auditor and two mayors. His behavior, as always, required scrutiny and serious correction. Or would the uncles see it another way? Maybe Arnette’s baby would be a boy, a Morgan grandnephew. Would her father, Arnold, have any rights then that the Morgans had to respect?
             
    Fondling Ben’s coat, picking burrs from the silky strands of hair, K.D. tried to think like his uncles—which was hard. So he stopped trying and slipped off into his dream of choice. Only this time it included Gigi and her screaming tits.
    “Hi.” She cracked her gum like a professional. “Is this Ruby? Bus driver said this was it.”
    “Yep. Yeah. Uh huh. Sure is.” The lounging boys spoke as one.
    “Any motels around?”
    They laughed at that and felt comfortable enough to ask her who she was looking for and from where she had come.
    “Frisco,” she said. “And rhubarb pie. Got a light?”
    The dream, then, would be in Frisco.
             
    The Morgan men conceded nothing but were uneasy at the choice of meeting place. Reverend Misner had thought it best to serve protocol and go to Fleetwood rather than season the raw insult done to the family by making the aggrieved come to the house of the aggressor.
    K.D., Deek and Steward had sat in the parsonage living room all nods and conciliatory grunts, but K.D. knew what his uncles were thinking. He watched Steward shift tobacco and hold the juice. So far the credit union Misner had formed was no-profit—small emergency loans to church members; no-penalty payback schedules. Like a piggy bank, Deek had said. But Steward said, Yeah for now. The reputation of the church Misner had left to come to Ruby floated behind him: covert meetings to stir folks up; confrontations with rather than end runs around white law. He obviously had hope for a state that had once decided to build a whole new law school to accommodate one student—a Negro girl—and protect segregation at the same time. He clearly took seriously the possibility of change in a state that had also built an open closet right next to a classroom for another Negro student to sit in by himself. That was in the forties, when K.D. was a nursing infant, before his mother, her brothers, his cousins, and all the rest left Haven. Now, some twenty years later, his uncles listened weekly to Misner’s sermons, but at the close of each of them they slid behind the steering wheel of their Oldsmobile and Impala and repeated the Old Fathers’ refrain: “Oklahoma is Indians, Negroes and God mixed. All the rest is fodder.” To their dismay, Reverend Misner often treated fodder like table food. A man like that could encourage strange behavior; side with a teenage girl; shift ground to Fleetwood. A man like that, willing to throw money away, could give customers ideas. Make them think there was a choice about interest