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“What do you think he wants?” I said. “Our Juicy Fruit?” A loco was supposed to be made an offering, after all.

The old man was muttering to himself now, pawing the ground with his feet. The figure behind hurried closer. “Come away from there, Pop. Leave those kids alone,” she called. The woman was wide, dough-faced. Her straw hair flapped in the wind.

“Don’t it steam yew up?” the old man said to her. “They just sittin’ there spick-a-da Spanish. What they doin’ here anyway? They got a school over there fer these varmint.”

“No, Pop. It don’t steam me up. What do steam me up is yer standing out here yellin’. Come on home now. Come on home.”

She led him off without a glance our way. I fingered the gum in my pocket, weighing whether I should run after him and put it in his hand. If I did, he could swallow me whole. If I didn’t, his curse could prove true: Maybe I didn’t have a right to be here, maybe my mother was wrong; maybe I wasn’t an American after all. But George just sat there, and so did I. We drew up our knees and watched the man and his big daughter toddle down the street and disappear into a pretty little white house.

I had never paid much attention to the way I looked, but I found myself standing in front of our bathroom mirror after that, studying my short dark hair, the skin on my face and neck, stripping myself naked and watching the way I moved. I barked in Spanish at my own reflection, then mouthed the words, imagining how the motions of my face would look to people who couldn’t understand what I was saying. I mimicked the boy next door. “Hey, you!” I shouted to myself, putting on his scowl, drawling the words like a native. “Jist who do yew think yew are?”

Just who had that old man thought we were? He had said we belonged on the niggah side of town. Was Rawlins cut in half? Was there a Whites side and a Colored side, like the doors we’d run up against in the bathrooms of St. Louis? Would Mother be taken away from us? Would Papi be forced to go back where he belonged?

“Your hair is black,” my mother had said to Vicki. “But you’re white, like me.”

I, on the other hand, had suspected my skin would fool no one. There was nothing white about me. I was colored, for sure.

There is a trait I recognize now in the child I was then, a curiosity about my own physical composition, an obsession bordering on fever. Perhaps that inquisitiveness is common to children of mixed parents. You till, you dig, you paw, searching for bits, scrabbling at roots, eager to learn to which tribe you belong. Are you more like one or more like the other? Are you one way when you’re in one country, but another when you’re not? You dangle from that precipice, wondering where to drop.

It is exhausting work, that transit between worlds, that two-way vertigo. I was half and half. Dr. Birdseye had told me so. But I hardly thought I was better off for it. I had two heads, two hearts. I was as unwieldy as Siamese twins on a high wire: too awkward for equipoise, too curious about the other side.

FRIDAYS AFTER SCHOOL, Huey and Nub would head for Rattlesnake Pass, Doc’s ranch at the foot of Elk Mountain. They were helping him build a house. Out there with them were two of Doc’s drinking pals: a beer-guzzling Mormon and a saloonkeeper from the oil-refinery town of Sinclair. Mondays, my cousins would come back full of stories about the men’s booze binges, each tale giddier than the last. The cabin floor, it seemed, had started out well enough—the tiles straight-edged and orderly—but by the time the last squares were laid, the rows were as swacked as the hands that had laid them. Grandpa Doc didn’t seem to mind. The boys were out on the prairie, out of harm’s way.

Each day in town, however, brought its grim turn, a shift in the bearing walls. Grandma Lo was in and out of a coma; her doctors’ efforts were proving futile. She was taken one day from her bed in the Ferguson and driven down the street to the Mormon’s house. Grandpa Doc’s weekend drinker had turned out to be married to a nurse. It was a