The attack on Levee’s family and his father’s revenge is the childhood trauma Levee recounts to explain how he learned to face white violence: his mother was assaulted by a gang of white men, he tried to defend her with his father’s knife and was left with a long scar, and his father later hunted down four of the attackers before being captured and killed. Told as Levee insists that no one else understands him, the recollection connects the family’s loss to his practiced defiance and his belief that apparent submission can conceal a plan for retaliation.

The Attack in Jefferson County

Levee says he was eight when the men came to his father’s house in Jefferson County, about eighty miles outside Natchez. His father, Memphis Lee Green, had acquired nearly fifty acres of good farmland after leaving sharecropping, saving and borrowing until he could buy the property from the widow of Mr. Hallie. Neighbors called him an uppity Black man for becoming independent. When planting time approached, he went to Natchez for seed and fertilizer, telling the boy to look after his mother while he was gone.

Levee’s mother was frying chicken when eight or nine white men entered and seized her. She fought them, but Levee understood that she could not stop them. He says he did not know exactly what they were doing to her; in his fear, he thought they might as well do it to him too. Remembering the knife his father kept for hunting and work, he found it and tried to cut one of the men’s throat. He struck the man’s shoulder instead. The attacker took the knife and slashed Levee across the chest, leaving the long scar Levee later shows the musicians.

The men stopped when they feared Levee might bleed to death. His mother wrapped him in a sheet and carried him two miles to the Furlow place, where someone drove him to Doc Albans. The doctor was waiting for a calf to be born and said he had no time to see the boy, so they took Levee to Miss Etta, a midwife, who treated him. His account dwells not only on the assault but on the child’s attempt to intervene and the practical chain of help that followed his injury.

Retaliation and the Lesson Levee Draws

After the assault, Levee’s father appeared to accept what had happened, but first he obtained the attackers’ names from Levee’s mother. The family announced that it was leaving the county, said goodbye to the neighbors, and moved in with relatives in Caldwell. Before departing, Levee’s father smiled at one of the men who had attacked his wife and sold him the farmland. To Levee, that smile was not surrender: his father was concealing his intention to return for the men.

Once the family was settled, Levee’s father disappeared into the woods and hunted the attackers. He killed four before they tracked him down, captured him, hanged him, and set him on fire. The revenge therefore answered the assault only at a terrible cost: the father who had secured his family’s escape was himself killed, and Levee never saw him again.

Levee presents his father’s conduct as the lesson that shaped his own way of dealing with white men. He remembers the contrast between the outward smile and the concealed plan, and insists that he, too, can say yes while keeping his own intentions. His declaration that he has time coming to him turns the memory into more than an account of childhood violence: it is the origin of a guarded defiance that others in the band mistake for accommodation. After his story, a long pause gives way to Slow Drag beginning a song, leaving Levee’s account suspended between remembered terror and the performance that follows.

The Memory’s Return in the Argument over God

The childhood assault returns later as more than a remembered injury: it supplies the personal evidence behind Levee’s challenge to Cutler’s faith. After Cutler tells of Reverend Gates, a Black preacher whom a white mob forced to dance and stripped of his cross and Bible, Levee asks where God was while the violence happened. He refuses Cutler’s warning about hell as an answer, insisting instead that a God who did not protect Reverend Gates could not be trusted to protect Black people.

Levee then brings his mother into the dispute. He recalls hearing her plead for mercy and help during the assault, and asks whether God turned away from her as well. The account makes clear why the question is not abstract theology for him: the child who had watched his mother attacked and tried to intervene now treats her unanswered prayer as proof of divine indifference. As he becomes absorbed in addressing God, he forgets Cutler and stabs upward into the air, turning the argument into a physical reenactment of helplessness and rage. The recollection thus links the family’s violence to Levee’s present refusal of religious consolation, while the scene leaves his accusation unanswered.

Performance and Dramatic Transition

Levee does not offer the story as detached history. Before naming the assault, he insists that no one knows what kind of blood or heart he has, pounding his chest; later, he raises his shirt to expose the scar left by the knife. The movement from boast to bodily evidence makes the wound an answer to the band’s judgment of him: his defiance is rooted in what he endured as a child, not merely in the pose others see.

The telling ends with a long pause, after which Slow Drag begins playing bass and singing “If I had my way.” That shift from Levee’s spoken account to music gives the remembered violence no tidy resolution; the performance follows the silence, carrying the scene onward without undoing what has been disclosed.