"Go on!" says Mis' Bingy. "We ain't the kind of folks them things are calculated for."
"It's a lie!" I says. "It's a lie! I could almost like 'em now—only I got so mad."
I set down on a bench in the park, and cried. And I didn't care who heard me.
Mis' Bingy stood up, waiting for me, hushing the baby back and forth on her hip.
"I use' to feel like that when I was a girl," she says. "You'll get over it." She kept saying that, several times. "You'll get over it, Cossy," as if she thought it was some comfort.
"That's what I'm afraid of," I says, after a while.
We transferred at Eighth Street on the way down, because there was something else I'd heard about and I hadn't ever seen yet. We walked east through the square, under the arch, and I asked a policeman for what I was looking for, and he showed me: The top story where the fire had been in a factory. The girls had told me about it, and I told Mis' Bingy, and we stood and looked. That was where they had jumped from. That was where they had hit the sidewalk, a hundred and eighteen of them, smashed or burned to death.
"It might have been you, Cossy," Mis' Bingy says, staring up and swinging the baby.
"It was me," I says. "I felt like it was me when I heard it—and I feel like it was me now."