BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

MARCH 1966

It might have been the fact that he ran a red light and got away with it. Getting away with stuff made him hard.

In front of him was the open road, behind him the same old thing.

He had some cash in his pocket and the clothes on his back. This was God telling him he was invincible. This was how he and God talked: through signs and secret messages. He ran another red light, just to test his theory.

This time, the world exploded with a crunch of metal, a sparkling shower of glass, spinning streetlights. A van had T-boned the car. He didn’t count bad signs from God.

He wrenched open the driver’s side door and stood to his full six foot two inches. A hysterical jackrabbit of a redhead was crying, apologizing.

He looked down. Limbs intact, a scratch here and there. His coat was made of glitter now, dusted with glass fine as sand. He brushed off the bigger chunks as he walked in the direction of the Greyhound station.

He didn’t mind the bus. He was happy as long as he was moving through the night, watching the hypnotic broken white line. The one that pulls your thoughts back, even as it guides your vehicle forward.

Sam stopped over in Baltimore. Never takes long to find the stroll, get by on petty theft and the kindness of women. But even in March, the wind off the harbor was cold as a dead hooker’s pussy. Sam had a hankering for the lush humidity of Miami. He’d need enough pocket cash to get there.

Sam walked into a liquor store on the south side of town one night with visions of a sunset over the Miami ocean, a layer cake of blues and yellows and pinks, the silhouettes of palm trees. He sported his favorite leather trench coat, a pair of Stetsons. He ran his hand over his slicked-back hair. Some of the kids in the big cities were letting their hair grow wild. Black power, all that. Sam watched the news with interest, but it was more for entertainment than anything. For his purposes, he preferred Blackness as invisibility.

Facing him from behind the counter was a clammy old Jew with a comb-over and a shirt yellowed at the armpits. Spur of the moment, half a goof, Sam put his hand in his pocket as if it were a gun.

“Give me all your money!”

The lackluster store owner sprang to life and pulled a .38 from behind the counter. Sam should have realized no Jew was unprepared for an attack. The first bullet caught Sam in the side, the next two passed through either arm, and the final two lodged in his back. He thought for a moment he was being hit by bricks. It took five shots to drop him.

Handcuffed to the bed in the hospital, Sam watched as his roommate coded and was toe-tagged. The poor sap had only been stabbed in the leg, but he developed sepsis. Sam took five bullets and was still strong as an ox. It was only a matter of time until he was free again. Another little greeting card from God, though he did catch a four-year armed robbery sentence.

He was a model prisoner, painting pictures for the inmates and guards, sending cheerful letters to his family in Ohio.

On the morning of April 5, 1968, he was looking forward to road detail. That was where you got to see girls. No sooner had they piled out of the bus than they turned back around as the block around them erupted in shouts and sobs. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated the day before in Memphis. In the halls of the penitentiary, the men roiled with grief and anger, their howls bouncing off one another like bubbles in a boiling pot.

Sam never met his cousin Malcolm X, but he knew the famous man had spent time in prison too. Malcolm went a whole different way with it. Look at him now. Dead.

Sam slouched beside the bus and snuck a cig. Why would you get into a fight you’re sure to lose? Sam saw racial inequality as not a social ill but a reason for the rest of the sheep to be distracted while he slid through the shadows like a wolf.

In 1969, he was paroled, having served nearly two years of his four-year sentence. Next thing, he was on a Greyhound to Coconut Grove, back to Bessie Mae. Sam’s hair was already growing long and wild. He was ready for coconuts and brown-eyed girls…brown-eyed squirrels. Ha!

You, my brown-eyed squirrel.

So many fucking squirrels. What was one, more or less?

Later that night, Bessie Mae cried whiskey-infused tears as she shoved plate after plate of ribs in front of her son. Sammy was a rolling stone, but Bessie Mae launched right in—she wanted a grandchild.

A big gal in a gray maid’s uniform with a white apron shuffled past, offered a half-hearted hello toward the kitchen with her eyes locked on the floorboards.

“Yvonne, honey! Yvonne, baby,” cried Bessie Mae with a gusto that startled the girl. “Meet my son.”

“Didn’t know you had no son.”

She caught Sam’s eye, looked down again.

“Don’t be a fool. Told you a million times, this is my one true boy,” said Bessie Mae. She cradled Sam’s cheeks in her palms and loudly kissed his face. “Don’t be shy, honey lamb,” said Bessie Mae. “You afraid of them eyes? Could fall into those eyes and get lost forever, huh? Has his rapscallion of a daddy’s cheekbones too. Indian blood, what fault that is.”

Bessie Mae’s husband, Robert Lee, disappeared to the kitchen to fix Yvonne a bowl of leftover dirty rice and a finger of whiskey.

The Littles had been from the wrong side of the tracks in Reynolds. Bessie Mae told Sam the Guices on Paul’s side weren’t exactly pastors either—ask anyone in Reynolds. Look what that smooth-talking son of a bitch had done to the both of them.

“You know what, Mama?”

“Yes, baby?”

“I think I’m gonna be Sam Little now. I ain’t no McDowell.”

“Mr. Sam Little,” said Yvonne as Bessie Mae cried with joy. “It’s a handsome name.”

He shacked up with Yvonne in two days, in the same room he had shared with Jackie, with the same hole in the wall. After a failed gig digging graves, Sam landed a job with the Dade County Sanitation Department. By day, he ferried other people’s trash. By night, he trolled the stroll, stalking the boulevards of Miami’s Overtown. Day and night, it crawled with whores and homosexuals and wannabes.

Thoughts of necks permeated his days of drudgery. Necks—so weak. Faulty engineering, really. He looked around and saw weakness in bar crawlers. Weakness in the white folk Yvonne happily served. Weakness in his girlfriend. Weakness in his own mama. Weakness everywhere. Opportunity.