Robert looked at Willie.

Robert spoke softly. “I worked in a store before. Down south.”

“No job here,” the man said.

“I’m saying I have experience with—”

“No job here,” the man repeated, more gruffly this time.

“Let’s go, Robert,” Willie said. She was already halfway out the door by the time the man had opened his mouth a second time.

They didn’t speak for two blocks. They passed a restaurant with a sign hanging up, but Willie didn’t have to look at Robert to know they would keep walking past it. Before long they were back at Lil Joe’s place.

“Y’all back already?” Joe asked when they entered. Carson was asleep on the mattress, his little body curled up just so.

“Willie just wanted to check on the baby. She wanted to give you a chance to rest. Ain’t that right, Willie?”

Willie could feel Joe looking at her as she answered, “Yeah, that’s right.”

Robert turned on his heel and was out of the door in a flash.

Willie sat down next to the baby. She watched him sleep. She wondered if she could watch him sleep all day, and so she tried. But after a while a strange and helpless panic set in, about what she didn’t know. That he wasn’t really breathing. That he didn’t recognize his own hunger and therefore would not whine for her to feed him. That he wouldn’t know her from any other woman in this new, big city. She woke him up just to hear him cry. And it was only then, when the cry set in, soft at first and then a shrieking, full-bellied sound, that she was finally able to relax.

“They thought he was white, Joe,” Willie said. She could feel him watching her as she watched Carson.

Joe nodded. “I see,” he said soberly, and then he walked away and let her be.

Willie waited anxiously for Robert to return. She wondered, for the first time really, if leaving Pratt City had been a mistake. She thought about Hazel, whom she hadn’t yet heard from since leaving, and a wave of missing hit her, desperate and sad. She had another forward memory. This time of loneliness. She could feel it approaching, a condition she would have to learn to live with.

Robert came back to the apartment. He had been to the barber, his hair cut close. He had bought new clothes, with the last of their savings no doubt, Willie thought, and the clothes he had been wearing when he left were nowhere in sight. He sat down on the bed next to Willie, rubbed Carson’s back. She looked at him. He didn’t look like himself.

“You spent the money?” Willie asked. Robert wasn’t meeting her eyes, and she couldn’t remember the last time Robert had done that. Even on that first day she’d gone to play with him, even as she pushed him, even as he fell, Robert had always kept his eyes steadily, almost ravenously, on hers. His eyes were the first things she’d questioned about him, and the first thing she’d loved.

“I ain’t gon’ be my father, Willie,” Robert said, his eyes still on Carson. “I ain’t gon’ be the kind of man who can only do one thing. I’m gonna make a life for us. I know I can do it.”

He looked at her finally. He brushed her cheek with his hand, then cupped the back of her neck. “We here now, Willie,” he pleaded. “Let’s be here.”

—

What “being here” meant for Willie: Every morning, she and Robert would wake up. She would get Carson ready to take downstairs to an old woman named Bess who watched all the building’s babies for a small fee. Robert would shave, comb down his hair, button his shirt. Then the two of them would walk out into Harlem to look for work, Robert in his fancy clothes and Willie in her plain ones.

Being here meant they no longer walked together on the sidewalk. Robert always walked a little ahead of her, and they never touched. She never called his name anymore. Even if she was falling into the street or a man was robbing her or a car was coming at her, she knew not to call his name. She’d done it once, and Robert had turned, and everyone had stared.

At first, they both looked for jobs in Harlem. One store had even hired Robert, but after a week there was a misunderstanding when a white customer had leaned in close to Robert to ask him how he could resist taking any one of the Negro women who frequented the store for himself. And Robert came home that night crying to Willie that it could have been her the man was talking about, and so he’d quit.

The next day, they both went searching again. This time they only walked so far south before splitting off, and Willie lost Robert to the rest of Manhattan. He looked so white now, it only took a few seconds for her to lose him completely, just one white face among the many, all bustling up and down the sidewalks. After two weeks in Manhattan, Robert found a job.

It took Willie three more months to find work, but by December she was a housekeeper for the Morrises, a wealthy black family who lived on the southern edge of Harlem. The family had not yet resigned themselves to their own blackness, so they crept as close to the white folks as the city would allow. They could go no further, their skin too dark to get an apartment just one street down.

During the day, Willie took care of the Morrises’ son. She fed him and bathed him and laid him down for his nap. Then she cleaned the apartment from top to bottom, making sure to wipe under the candelabra because Mrs. Morris always checked. In the early evening she would begin cooking. The Morrises had been in New York since before the Great Migration, but they ate as though the South was a place in their kitchen instead of one that was miles and miles away. Mrs. Morris usually came home first. She worked as a seamstress, and her hands were often pricked and bleeding. Once she got home, Willie would leave for her auditions.

She was too dark to sing at the Jazzing. That’s what they told her the night she’d come in ready to audition. A very slender and tall man held a paper bag up to her cheek.

“Too dark,” he said.

Wille shook her head. “But I can sing, see.” She opened her mouth and took a deep breath, filling up the balloon of her belly, but then the man put two fingers to her, pushed the air out.

“Too dark,” he repeated. “Jazzing’s only for the light girls.”

“I saw a man dark as midnight walk in with a trombone.”

“I said girls, honey. If you were a man, maybe.”

If she were Robert, Willie thought. Robert could have any job he wanted, but she knew he was too scared to try. Scared he’d be found out or scared that he didn’t have enough education. The other night he’d told her that a man had asked him why he spoke “that way,” and he’d become scared to talk. He would not tell her exactly what he did for a living, but he came back home to her smelling like the sea and meat, and he made more money in a month than she had ever seen in her entire life.

Robert was cautious, but she was wild. It had always been that way. The first night he had lain with her, he’d been so nervous that his penis had rested against his left leg, a log on the river of his quivering thigh.

“Your daddy’s gon’ kill me,” he’d said. They were sixteen, their parents at a union meeting.

“I’m not thinkin’ ’bout my daddy right now, Robert,” she’d said, trying to stand the log. She’d put each of his fingers into her mouth one by one and had bitten the tips, watching him all the while. She’d eased him into her and moved on top of him until he was begging her: to stop, to not stop, to quicken, to slow. When he closed his eyes, she’d bidden him to open them, to look at her. She liked to be the star of the show.