“Hey, Miss Sophia. How you doing?”

The screen door opened and the woman stood back to let Margery in, her hands on her hips, thick dark coils of hair pinned to her scalp. She lifted her head as if surveying her carefully. “Well, now. I haven’t seen you in—what—eight years?”

“Something like that. You haven’t changed none, though.”

“Get in here.”

Her face, so thin and stern in repose, broke into a lovely smile, and Margery repaid it in full. For several years Margery had accompanied her father on his moonshine runs to Hoffman, one of his more lucrative routes. Frank O’Hare figured that nobody would look twice at a girl with her daddy making deliveries into the settlement and he figured right. But while he made his way around the residential section, trading jars and paying off security guards, she would make her way quietly to the colored block, where Miss Sophia would lend her books from her family’s small collection.

Margery had not been allowed to go to school—Frank had seen to that. He didn’t believe in book learning, no matter how hard her mother had pleaded. But Miss Sophia and her mother, Miss Ada, had fostered in her a love of reading that, many evenings, had taken her a million miles from the darkness and violence of her home. And it wasn’t just the books: Miss Sophia and Miss Ada always looked immaculate, their nails perfectly filed, their hair rolled and braided with surgical precision. Miss Sophia was only a year older than Margery, but her family represented to her a kind of order, a suggestion that life could be conducted quite differently from the noise, chaos and fear of her own.

“You know, I used to think you were going to eat those books, you were so hungry for them. Never knew a girl read so many so fast.”

They smiled at each other. And then Margery spied William. He was seated in a chair by the window and the left leg of his pants was pinned neatly under the stump where it ended. She tried not to let the shock of it show as even a flicker on her face.

“Good afternoon, Miss Margery.”

“I’m real sorry to hear about your accident, William. Are you in much pain?”

“It’s tolerable,” he said. “Just don’t like not being able to work, that’s all.”

“He’s about as ornery as all get out,” said Sophia, and rolled her eyes. “He hates being in the house more than he hates losing that leg. You sit down and I’ll fetch you a drink.”

“She tells me I make the place look untidy.” William shrugged.

The Kenworth cabin was the neatest, Margery suspected, for twenty miles. There was not a speck of dust or an item out of place, testament to Sophia’s fearsome organizational skills. Margery sat and drank a glass of sarsaparilla, and listened as William told her how the mine had laid him off after his accident. “Union tried to stand up for me but since the shootings, well, nobody wants to stick their neck out too far for a black fellow. You know what I’m saying?”

“They shot two more union men last month.”

“I heard.” William shook his head.

“The Stiller brothers shot the tires out of three trucks headed out from the tipple. Next time they went into the company store at Friars to organize some of the men, a bunch of thugs trapped them in there and a whole bunch had to come over from Hoffman’s to get them out. He’s sending a warning.”

“Who?”

“Van Cleve. You know he’s behind half of this.”

“Everybody knows,” said Sophia. “Everybody knows what goes on in that place but nobody wants to do nothing.”

The three of them sat in silence for so long that Margery almost forgot why she had come. Finally she put her glass down. “This isn’t just a social call,” she said.

“You don’t say,” said Sophia.

“I don’t know if you heard, but I’ve been setting up a library over at Baileyville. We got four of us librarians—just local girls—and a whole lot of donated books and journals, some on their last legs. Well, we need someone to organize us, and fix up the books, because it turns out you can’t do fifteen hours a day in the saddle and keep the rest of it straight, too.”

Sophia and William looked at each other.

“I’m not sure what this has to do with us,” Sophia said.

“Well, I was wondering if you’d come and organize it for us. We have a budget for five librarians, and there’s a decent wage. Paid for by the WPA, and the money’s good for at least a year.”

Sophia leaned back in her seat.

Margery persisted: “I know you loved working at the library at Louisville. And you could be back here in an hour each day. We’d be glad to have you.”

“It’s a colored library.” Sophia’s voice hardened. She folded her hands in her lap. “The library at Louisville. It’s for colored folk. You must be aware of that, Miss Margery. I can’t come work for a white person’s library. Unless you’re actually asking me to ride horses with you and I can sure as anything tell you I’m not going to be doing that.”

“It’s a traveling library. People don’t come in and out borrowing stuff. We go to them.”

“So?”

“So nobody even needs to know you’re there. Look, Miss Sophia, we’re desperate for your help. I need someone I can trust to mend the books, and get us straight, and you are, by anyone’s standards, the finest librarian for three counties.”

“I’m going to say it again. It’s a white person’s library.”

“Things are changing.”

“You tell the men in hoods that when they come knocking at our door.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“I’m looking after my brother.”

“I know that. I’m asking you what you’re doing for money.”

The two siblings exchanged a look.

“That’s a mighty personal question. Even for you.”

William sighed. “We ain’t doing too good. We’re living off what we got saved and what our mama left. But it ain’t much.”

“William!” Sophia scolded him.

“Well, it’s the truth. We know Miss Margery. She knows us.”

“So you want me to go get my head busted working in a white folks’ library?”

“I won’t let that happen,” said Margery, calmly.

It was the first time Sophia did not answer. There were few advantages to being the offspring of Frank O’Hare, but people who had known him understood that if Margery promised something would happen, then in all likelihood, it would. If you had survived a childhood with Frank O’Hare, not much else was going to stand in your way.