Any Known Blood L H awrence ill Dedication To my grandparents, May Edwards Hill and Rev. Daniel G. Hill Jr., who lived and loved with dignity and passion Everybody having a known trace of Negro blood in his veins — no matter how far back it was acquired — is classified as a Negro. No amount of white ancestry, except one hundred per cent, will permit entrance to the white race. Gunnar Myrdal Vol. 1, An American Dilemma, 1944 My old man died in a fine big house My ma died in a shack I wonder where I’m gonna die, Being neither white nor black? Langston Hughes “Cross,” in Selected Poems, 1959 PLAN OF OAKVILLE, TOWNSHIP OF TRAFALGAR, UPPER CANADA, 1835 CONTENTS Cover Title page Dedication Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 P.S. Ideas, interviews & features About the author Author Biography About the book An Interview with Lawrence Hill Read on An Excerpt from Some Great Thing From Lawrence Hill’s Essay “Is Africa’s Pain Black America’s Burden?” Further Reading Web Detective Acknowledgments About the Author Praise for Any Known Blood: A Word About History Copyright About the Publisher Prologue SHE CAME TO HIS ROOM after darkness fell, confident that nobody had followed her. He lived alone, in a room above a dry goods store. The yellow moon hung fat and full, so low that it shone through his window. It threw their shadows against the wall as they came together, touched lips, touched tongues. She unfastened the buttons of his pants. He drew up her dress, peeled back her undergarments, and discovered her already wet. Her knees buckled. She almost fell back onto the bed. But he caught her, and righted her, and they pulled apart just enough to undress each other. He had turned out the gas lamp before she came to him, and there were no candles burning. There was only the moonlight, and the undulation of moon shadows above his bed. Clothes pooled around their ankles. They remained standing, running fingers over bone, muscle, soft places, hard places. They turned to observe their own shadows cast against the wall. Neither spoke. He ran his middle finger down from the crown of her head, between her eyes, along the thin bridge of her nose, onto her lips. She drew her palm across his shoulder, around his pectoral muscles, down to his navel. They watched their shadows, and, to see them better, stood slightly apart. They saw his erection and one of her breasts profiled on the wall, they watched their own hands joining, and they noticed that the shadows revealed nothing of her whiteness, or his blackness. They eased onto the bed and continued with their slow and patient lovemaking. When she finally guided him into her, he held still to relax and extend their pleasure. She lay back, closed her eyes, and tightened and relaxed and tightened herself around him, feeling him grow harder inside her, the very thought of it quickening her breath. He raised his upper body. They locked together in a rhythmic and rocking motion, while their lips joined and parted and joined and parted. She thought, My God, I love this man, and he thought, I can die now and I won’t care. She cried out his name three times, and he felt a wave of gratitude as she shuddered and pulsated and ground her pelvic bone against his. She eased back down on the bed, still until he began to move again, faster and faster. As he felt the muscles in his groin tighten, and as his quickening arousal ignited within her an unexpected new fluttering of pleasure, voices from the street — the voices of two or three young men — assaulted them. You will die, nigger. You will die soon. A grapefruit-sized rock smashed his window and struck the side of the bed.