She had a way of walking up the block that had made me uncomfortable from the time I was ten years old. She walked like no other woman in the neighbourhood. A woman’s walk might be brisk or lazy, but inevitably it was the errand-bound walk of a housewife; her legs were attached to her torso for the strict purpose of useful locomotion, she was not walking to feel her body in motion or to have its movement acknowledged or responded to. Nettie was. Her walk was slow and deliberate. She moved first one haunch, then the other, making her hips sway. Everyone knew this woman was going nowhere, that she was walking to walk, walking to feel the effect she had on the street. Her walk insisted on the flesh beneath the clothes. It said, ‘This body has the power to make you want.’ There was nothing like her for a thousand miles around. Men and women alike hungered for her. It was awful. I could see she aroused strong emotion, but that emotion seemed bound up with punishment not privilege. The way people looked at her – the cruelty in the men, the anger in the women – made me fearful. I felt her in danger. Nettie walking up the block became woven into the fabric of early anxiety.