Once he learned the surprising news that black people were only superficially different from himself, Ran developed an unsurprising crush on her, and Delores—who’d been married once and had a child, who was attractive, single, and not inexperienced with men—was perfectly aware of Ransom’s feelings and used them shamelessly—but only for his benefit, encouraging his passion and his focus on the work, always pushing him a little further than he wished to go. She was the first person who made Ransom Hill believe that there was something in him worth an effort on another human being’s part. And this, Ran knew, was the one difference between him and his friend sat Bane and Depot: he found a second, better place to go. And he still said “nigger” when he was with them. He still laughed and called the part of town Delores lived in Niggertown—even though her house was brick and better than his own. But after Mrs. Mills, it never sat quite right, like some once-familiar food his system had lost the ability to digest. And even if he said it, even if he laughed, he knew Delores Mills had saved him. And so, when what he really wanted was to mount the stage at Shea and hit that riff of riffs and make those rich girls who had heaped such scorn on him grovel at his feet and beg for it, Ran, instead, took his place in line and marched up and down the sodden football field in his cheap shoes and played the slide trombone for Mrs. Mills. And he would have marched to hell for her and back by way of Selma, Alabama, if only Delores hadn’t had a daughter, if only her daughter hadn’t been Shanté….
If only at the Christmas choral program in assembly—in the midst of Handel and the standard fare, as Ransom, slouching somewhere in the twenty-second row, feigned sleep—Shanté, home for break from prep school, where early talent and her mother’s doggedness had won her a full ride, had not stepped forward from the chorus and begun to belt out “Jordan, Roll” in a voice as rich and strong as Gladys Knight’s, but with six or seven colors Knight’s did not possess. There was melting sexuality in it, and sorrow, and, in its upper register, a joyful longing that threw itself toward transcendence like a trapezist letting go the bar, careening through the spot with arms outstretched, never doubting that an unseen hand would lift her where it was her destiny to go.
If only none of this had happened, Ransom, three years later, on that hot September night, would not have been standing on Delores’s stoop with malt liquor on his breath, watching her fry chicken and afraid to knock. When he finally did, she glanced over her shoulder, wiped her hands, and came up to the screen and didn’t open it.
“Something sure smells good,” he said with a big grin full of desperate charm that would later open many doors. Not this door, though.
“I’m sorry, Ransom,” Delores said, “I can’t ask you in.”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, okay, well.” He was halfway down the steps before the impact hit him like a speeding car with a drunk driver at the wheel. He turned around and pressed his face against the screen. “Why not?” he asked in a soft, pleading voice. “Why not, Miz Mills?”
Delores looked him in the face, full in the face, for a long beat. In her expression, pity and sorrow had made peace with something else resigned and hard.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No, Ran, you didn’t.”
“Then why can’t I come in?”
Delores simply looked at him, and softly, slowly closed the inner door.
From the yard, he saw Shanté silhouetted in the dormer window. She put her hand against the glass. The train, by then, had left the station. In the distance, Mick was singing:
…it had two lights on behind
Well, the blue light was my baby, and the red light was my mind
Ransom turned away and threw his beer can at the streetlight. Punching someone’s car, he stumbled up the street, cradling his bleeding hand, with two tickets in his pocket for the New York City bus he took alone. As he went, the smell of Delores’s chicken followed him, which he never ate again.
Yet here it was today at Wando Passo, all around him now, the smell that wafted through the screen that night. And the curious thing was, Ran had not yet started cooking. Even before he floated the first breast, like a Viking longboat, out into the lake of oil to burn, the house was redolent with the smell of Delores Mills’s chicken, released by water’s softening action from the earth in a long-buried pot. And how this could be so, Ransom didn’t know, any more than he could explain the nature of this wine.
The more he drank of it, the more magisterial it became, filling him with an exquisite sadness, like a long view from an eminence on a perfect autumn day, with a
