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himself to someone. I shadowed them from the edge of the avenue, as all the other tasking men shadowed their charges, watching at a distance as Maynard grew more excited in conversation and Adeline’s tolerations were taxed. But she bore it well, as the ladies of Quality were trained to do. Her mistake had been appearing here without a gentleman at her side, one who could shield her from Maynard’s conversation, which was now so boisterous that I could hear it above the din of the crowd. He was going on about Lockless, about its prosperity and charms, about her mistake in not succumbing to them, and he did this in tedious jests that were only lightly concealed boasts, and Adeline was forced to bear all this with a smile.
    When they reached the racetrack, I watched as she was at last rescued by a passing gentleman, who extended his hand to Maynard and then quickly, sizing up the shape of things, rushed her away. Maynard paused at the gates, and then looked up into the stands to the jockey club, just beginning to fill with subscribers, where he’d once held forth but had been unceremoniously ejected. I walked closer now, with Adeline gone, then stood off to the side and looked to Maynard, who was now lost in a world of painful longing, for race-days past when he was welcomed, or at least allowed, among the gentlemen of the county. And then I saw the insult compound as Maynard’s eyes shifted from the gentlemen to the area demarcated for the ladies of Virginia, so that they need not suffer the gambling, coarse talk, and cigars of the men, and in that region I saw Maynard’s intended, Corrine Quinn, who seemed to have suffered nothing in her standing for her association with Maynard. And Maynard was no longer smiling, for he felt himself henpecked. There was his future wife, elevated to a standing higher than his own.
    I peered into the ladies’ club as subtly as I could to get a better look at this woman. Corrine Quinn was out of another time. She spurned the ostentation of the parade, the garments that, in their great extravagance, in their defiance, testified to the dying soil, the tasking families divided, the diminishing tobacco, the fall that was all around. She stood in the stands, in calico and gloves, talking to one of the other ladies, while Maynard watched with scornful eye. Then he shook his head and walked off to take his place, not among the gentlemen, but in the motley of low white men, a class whose position in this society of ours always amazed me. The low whites, men such as our own Harlan, were tolerated publicly by the Quality, but spurned in private; their names were spat out at banquets, their children mocked in the parlors, their wives and daughters seduced and discarded. They were a degraded and downtrodden nation enduring the boot of the Quality, solely for the right to put a boot of their own to the Tasked.
    My place was among the coloreds, some Tasked, some free, seated on the waist-high wooden fencing, just off from the stables, where still other colored men tended to the racehorses, feeding them and looking after their health. I knew a few of them—including Corrine’s man, Hawkins, whom I saw sitting on the fence with some of the others. I nodded in greeting. He nodded back, but did not smile. That was his way, this Hawkins. There was something cold and distant about him. He perpetually wore the look of a man who suffered no fools, but felt himself surrounded by them. He scared me. There was something hard about him, and I knew just by his manner that he had endured some terrible, unspeakable portion of the Task. I looked over and watched as the other colored men along the fence shouted and laughed with still others working the stables. And watching this silently, as was my way, I marveled at the bonds between us—the way we shortened our words, or spoke, sometimes, with no words at all, the shared memories of corn-shuckings, of hurricanes, of heroes who did not live in books, but in our