“Shut up,” said Schultzy, roughly.
Steve stepped to the window and threw up the shade, letting the morning light into the crowded disorderly little cubicle. On the bed lay Julie, her eyes enormous in her sallow pinched face.
“I’m Steve Baker. This is my wife.”
Sheriff Ike Keener tucked the paper in his pocket. “You two better dress and come along with me.”
Julie stood up. She looked an old woman. The marmoset whimpered and whined in his fur nest. She put out a hand, automatically, and plucked it from the muff and held it in the warm hollow of her breast. Her great black eyes stared at the sheriff like the wide-open unseeing eyes of a sleep walker.
Steve Baker grinned—rather, his lips drew back from his teeth in a horrid semblance of mirth. He threw a jovial arm about Julie’s shrinking shoulder. For once she had no need to coach him in his part. He looked Ike Keener in the eye. “You wouldn’t call a man a white man that’s got Negro blood in him, would you?”
“No, I wouldn’t; not in Mississippi. One drop of nigger blood makes you a nigger in these parts.”
“Well, I got more than a drop of—nigger blood in me, and that’s a fact. You can’t make miscegenation out of that.”
“You ready to swear to that in a court of law?”
“I’ll swear to it any place. I’ll swear it now.” Steve took a step forward, one hand outstretched. “I’ll do more than that. Look at all these folks here. There ain’t one of them but can swear I got Negro blood in me this minute. That’s how white I am.”