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that it was a “black” motel catering only to Negroes and that my father was extraordinarily lucky it even existed on that road between Sebastion and Birmingham. Most black families, when they traveled, stayed in homes of kinfolk, he tells me, or they slept in their vehicles for lack of any hotel that would accept them along their routes. But there was a tiny sprinkling of black-owned lodgings and the highway between my hometown and the “big city” had one of them.
    “Rundown, nasty place,” Hubert describes it. “Where nobody’d think to look for a white child. I rented the room with the cash your daddy gave to me. One buck fifty for the night, pay in advance at the front desk, and I asked for a crib, like he told me to. I remember the old man, the owner, he said, you not gonna let that baby cry, is you? I assured him that you were already asleep, that you slept as sound as money all through the nights. I think you were, in fact, asleep in the backseat where you daddy had laid you down on blankets your mamma gave him. I expect you were lulled to sleep in the car on the ride to the motel. I don’t remember you even letting out so much as a squeak. And you hardly stirred when I carried you inside—your daddy stayed hidden down low so nobody’d see him and wonder. I took you in and waited for the owner to bring up the crib. When he did, I didn’t let him see you, kept your face and your little hands hidden deep in your blankets. He didn’t care. He wasn’t a grandma who’d want a peek at you. He didn’t even bother to make up the crib for me, as I remember. But that was good. I just closed the door in his face and made up your crib and laid you in it and even then I don’t think you let out a peep.”
    Hubert then walked out of the room, closing the doorwithout locking it, and then he got back in the car with Michael.
    “But your daddy, he couldn’t bear it, to drive off like that without seeing you were safe in the room. He felt like a coward, I expect, huddling down like that, asking me to take you in. So real quick, he got out and ran into the room where you were sleeping. I imagine he just looked down at you, because he would have been afraid to wake you up with a hug or a kiss. It was important for nobody to find you yet. Later, later, we were counting on your crying to bring people around to look in on you. Eventually, somebody was going to complain about the baby crying. Or the maid was going to find you.”
    The two men left a bottle of milk in the crib with the baby.
    “Your mama, she wrote out a card where she spelled out your name and little things about you like what you would eat and what you wouldn’t eat, and how whoever found you should take you to your aunt and uncle and show them the card, which said to give them a good reward.
    “It scares me now,” Hubert admits, “to think of doing that, of trusting strangers to do right with a baby. Couldn’t ask nobody who actually knew your folks to go get you, for fear of getting them in awful trouble by association. We had to leave you to the proverbial kindness of strangers. Lord, I don’t know if I could do such a thing today. The things that could have happened to you, it chills my blood to consider them.
    “But I guess we did right. Nobody harmed you, or took you for their own, or tried to sell you, or gave you away to bad people. They just did exactly what your mama’s card asked them to do. Your aunt and uncle gave a twenty-dollar reward.”
    His smile is sardonic.
    “I suspect your mama and daddy thought you wasworth a little more than that. They’d have been angry at your aunt and uncle for being so cheap.”
    Then he leans toward me. “Listen here to me. Maybe you wish your mama had left a letter for you. Maybe you think they should both have written to you, for you to read later about what happened and how they loved you. But you’ve got to understand there wasn’t time, for one thing, and that people didn’t do that kind of