In the restaurant’s fading light, he tells the story to his woman. Warily, the way his father told it to him:
There once lived a man named Elijah. A man who, among many other things—blacksmith, singer, lover of russet pears—had been born a slave. In those days, Texas had yet again changed its mind about what it was. It had belonged to Mexico, then became its own fearsome land, then joined Polk’s America, then splintered off with the rest of the rebellious South. Texas dreamed of cotton and the hands to pick it. Elijah dreamed of Evaline, whom his master forbade him to call wife.
On that plantation by the Brazos River, they met by night, Elijah approaching the women’s cabin and unfolding the back of his throat to announce his arrival. Evaline heard the low, guttural trill of a nightjar and came out to meet him. They must’ve talked in that starry darkness. Perhaps she confessed that on the nights he did not come, she heard hundreds of such birds in the woods and believed him everywhere at once. Perhaps he told her about the extra minutes he spent playing with the horses instead of forging their shoes. Small victories against the master who was also his father. The man owned him in neither manner.