I would have never thought of the idea on my own. My wife was the one who worked in white people’s homes. She was the one who’d said, “They put these marks on a door frame to count they children’s height. I tried washing them marks off first time I saw ’em, but that white woman said, ‘What the hell you think you're doing, girl?’” She didn't say n*****, but Amelia knew that was how the sentence ended in the woman's mind. So I started drawing the measuring lines on our kitchen door frame with Rochelle, our last born. She was two years old when I started counting her height. She wasn’t the last person to die in the 1967 riot. The last person was number thirty-nine. Rochelle was number fifteen. When her world ended, she was barely three years old. I couldn’t count past that. 

I could count backwards, like in childhood rhymes we shared: “There was ten in bed and the little one said, ‘roll over,’” or “Five little monkeys jumpin’ on the bed. One fell off and bumped his head.” Ten in bed, so they all rolled over, one fell out, nine in bed. Five monkeys in bed to four. Rochelle fell while sleeping on her bed, bullet through head, blood on pillow and sheets. Two left over—firstborn Ronnie and secondborn Regina—and I’m living “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” with twelve-packs of E & B.