When Corean was young, her older siblings had told her that her high cheekbones were the Cherokee legacy of their father. Her paternal grandmother had thrilled Corean’s siblings by demonstrating that she could sit on her hair. “Black hair just doesn’t grow that long,” Corean said. But to prove the rumor and secure Fella a scholarship required producing ancestral birth certificates to which tribal codes had been affixed. Corean’s father had taken his family history with him when he vanished; all she really knew was that he was born in a southwest-Georgia peanut-farming town and died in another, four miles away. Still, as housekeeping work paid so poorly and no economically advantageous marriage was in the offing, this avenue of opportunity tempted her, and possessed an irony she appreciated. “I feel bad to say this,” she told Fella and Dana, “but my father might be more help to this family dead than he ever was alive.”

As the dinner dishes were washed and put away, Corean’s children dropped the Indian option and began chiding their mother about her strictness. “No playing cards in the house, having to come in for family prayers and singing every night, not even a phone call from a boy until we turned sixteen—you were so mean when I was a teen-ager, it was pathetic,” Dana said, wringing out a dish towel. “By the time I was seventeen, I was so itching to get away from you I bought my own tissue and soap and stored it in a box beneath my bed. And, when I finally did get my own place, me and the preacher’s daughter went and got ourselves a bottle of Bacardi and we cut up, I can assure you.”

Corean said what she always said in the face of her children’s mock recriminations: “When I see the Lord, I’m telling Him, look, if I messed up, I messed up trying.” And that was the thing about the Indian idea. It reminded a make-do woman that there was usually something else left to try.

“They’re all telling me, ‘I’m here for you, we love you, I’ll never let you go, our baby,’ but it’s too late,” went a poem that Kim had written and placed in her cardboard box. “My feet is slowly walking the sand under the water.” Her “Fragile—Eggs” depository now rested beside a concave orange-brown couch in the small home where her father, disabled by a stroke after leaving prison, lived. Kim was “in hiding” there, fearing that she would be arrested on the bad-check-writing charge. She still went to work every day, even when her friend Tiphani quit, forcing Kim back onto the bus. But the D.A.’s office knew that Kim lived in Sooner Haven. She gave up her unit and moved in with her father, three miles away.

Before leaving Sooner Haven, she had received the results of her general-equivalency exam. She’d aced everything except math. A teacher at a local community college had offered to help her master the math and apply for college. But the tutoring conflicted with Kim’s telemarketing hours, which were non-negotiable. “Still, I’ve come this far, I’m not going to give up,” she said. She now owed around nine hundred dollars in fines from the bounced checks. Increasingly fearful of doing jail time, she had decided to take out a loan from “a guy named Dave, whose whole business is helping people who have hot-check charges against them.”

Kim still wanted to be Derrick’s wife, and he had agreed to move in with her when they had the means for an apartment. Marriage class had helped her grasp the work involved in achieving a deeper level of commitment; in addition, it reinforced her sense that the child she longed for should have two parents. But steady proximity to Derrick had also given her a sense of how married life would and wouldn’t change her general circumstances. Her father’s couch was too narrow for two, so when she slept with Derrick now it was at his mother’s apartment, where he was living to save money. “He goes to work in the early morning, I get home after midnight, and sometimes we both work six or seven days a week because of his son and my debts. So even when we coördinate our schedules we’re tired. We play this video game called Tetris and go to sleep.”

Some nights while Kim was trying to pitch A. T. & T.’s services to residents of Long Beach or Dayton or Scarsdale, the computers connected her to women who, she suspected, were struggling even harder than she was to get by—women who didn’t want to switch phone carriers, who just wanted to keep another voice on the end of the line. Sometimes Kim’s supervisor listened in, and he would cut off the call. But when he wasn’t listening Kim asked the women about their jobs, the men who disappointed them, the bills they couldn’t pay. She learned the callers’ names, gave them her own, promised to stay in touch.

One frigid morning, Corean’s daughter Shandy, who was weak from mononucleosis, drove Corean to the Oklahoma City Greyhound station. The previous week, Corean had taken Shandy to the hospital, a specialist, and the pharmacy, bouncing checks all the way. Shandy, although she was employed, could not afford health insurance. “I know what happened to Kim, but I was fearing major medical,” Corean said. “If you’re poor, the government will cover you until you’re eighteen, and then after you’re sixty-five. That’s forty-seven years on your own.” Unless, she added, eyes bright, “you are an Indian.”

A ticket from Oklahoma City to the Georgia peanut fields of her father’s birth cost sixty-nine dollars but the journey took seven buses and two days. Outside the Oklahoma City limits, Corean stared through the window at the designated capitals of a series of Indian nations—capitals that, from her vantage, looked suspiciously like gas stations selling off-brand beer.

It felt odd not to have a child in tow. “This is the future,” she said. “I best get used to it.” The strangeness was tempered by the fact that on the Greyhound people treated her with more respect than she was used to getting in the project—even when, in the Ozarks, drug-enforcement dogs were unleashed on the passengers’ luggage. One bus driver reserved the front seat—farthest from the toilet smells—for Corean and an enormous pink church hat with dotted-swiss netting which she carried along with her Bible. “It’s obvious you’re a lady,” he said. At the edge of the Mississippi delta, another driver pulled to the side of the road and held her elbow as she climbed stiffly off the bus. A minute later, she returned triumphant, brandishing a six-and-a-half-foot stalk of sugarcane. She hadn’t seen cane since she was a child in the fields.

“People are quite friendly and interesting when you get out in the world,” she said, feeling almost regretful when the bus pulled up to a secondhand-furniture store (“No Cash, No Credit, No Problem”) that doubled as the bus depot of Sylvester, Georgia.

W. E. B. Du Bois, in “The Souls of Black Folk,” called this part of southwest Georgia “perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew.” As the proprietor of the furniture store watched her things, Corean set out on foot through the shabby downtown toward the county courthouse. The entrance hall, lined with framed portraits of white civic leaders, was being mopped by a black female prison crew, one of whom directed her to the public-records office. There, she was no longer the first lady of the cross-country Greyhound bus. A records search showed that her father had no birth certificate, let alone a tribal number. “Lotta poor folks just had their babies in the woods and didn’t tell no one,” a young black clerk tried to console her, directing her to the Corinthian-columned public library across the street. In the genealogy room there, two elderly white couples were paging through books like “Men of Mark in Georgia” and tapping intently into a stretch of new computers. “Before this, we were in Salt Lake City, doing the Mormon Church records,” one of the men said to the other. “We have it nailed down to 1830.” The burning numbness in her arm had kept Corean awake for two nights. She sat at a table before a pile of thick brown books, trying to make sense of twentieth-century county censuses. Decade after decade, her father’s family—her family—had not been counted. Corean got a second wind in the evening when she called home to check on Fella. “Harvard, Yale, I don’t know about them. I guess those are places for the extremely wealthy,” she said. “But if we could pay for the best school in Oklahoma, and then medical school . . .”