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said. “It’s Meesha and Keesha’s birthday.”
    “Meesha and Keesha?”
    “The twins.”
    “I would have never guessed. What twins?”
    “Harriet’s twins. Just come on and you’ll see.”
    In the living room a sheet was spread out on the worn wooden floor. In the middle a cake slathered in white icing was graced with a single candle flickering in the drafty room. Two identically dressed babies sat on either side, looking up at the looming adults with that complacent apprehension one sometimes finds in babies.
    A girl I took to be Harriet towered over them, and me. She was wearing a purple paisley tube of some kind of stretchy material with a black patent-leather belt. Her large hands and feet left no doubt as to whose daughter she was. She wasn’t quite as dark as M, except around her elbows and knees. She hovered over the twins in a half-crouch, her knees together. “Blow out the candle,” she said in baby talk. The twins just looked at her.
    “Make a wish,” Mrs. Marshall said, also in baby talk and also towering. The twins blinked in unison, realigned their sights on her, and picked up where they had left off, doing their best imitation of confused one-year-old babies.
    Across the room an older man with close-cropped gray hair sat in a frowzy armchair, a newspaper open in his lap. He watched the babies dispassionately, but I thought I detected a hint of amusement.
    M strode forward. “They don’t know how to blow out a candle. They’re only one!” He leaned over and blew the candle out.
    “Now have some cake,” Harriet said.
    “Yes, eat your birthday cake,” Mrs. Marshall said. “It’s chocolate. Everybody like chocolate cake.”
    M looked from his sister to his mother with exasperation, leaned over, scooped icing off the cake with his finger, and shoved some in each baby’s mouth. Their expressions changed instantly, and they converged on the cake. Before Mrs. Marshall had time to cut us slices from the other cake set aside in the kitchen, there were three lumpy masses of icing and cake in the middle of the sheet, like an accident scene of a collision with a zebra, a penguin, and a nun. Two of them moved. M and I disappeared into the basement before we were recruited for cleanup duty.
    M dug up two claw hammers, turned off the light, and we took turns banging on a nail, trying to make sparks. We labored in shadow, silhouetted by the light from the little rectangular basement window high above us.
    I began singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” but stopped when M threatened to switch his attentions from the nail head to my head.
    “Did you read that book I gave you, man?” M asked between strokes.
    “Hey, that was only two days ago.”
    “Do you know who John Brown was?”
    I began singing again. “John Brown’s body lies a molderin’ in the grave . . .” but the silhouette of M’s hammer hung over me in the gloom and I quit.
    “Why was his body molderin’ in a grave?”
    “He was dead.” That was an easy one!
    “Why did he die?”
    That was a little tougher. “Uh, chicken pox?”
    M rolled his eyes, which was about all I could see of him, and resumed his hammering. “Do you know who George Washington was?”
    “Of course.”
    “George Washington Carver?”
    “Yes.”
    M stopped. “Really?”
    “Of course. He invented the peanut.” I held the hammer aloft and spun around. “And Bingo was his name-o!”
    M didn’t laugh. “OK, man, how about W. B. DuBois?”
    I stopped and peered at him in the dimness. “Uh, can you spell it?”
    “Marcus Garvey?”
    “That’s the guy you’re named after, right?”
    “One of them.”
    “What did he do?”
    “Read the book.” He slammed the hammer down. “Look, sparks!”

    As the weeks passed, M and I eventually bored of banging on nails in the basement and hanging from rafters in the attic. My house offered even less excitement. We had already squeezed the neighborhood dry of every last drop of entertainment. We