A man is raking leaves outside his own home on a crisp November afternoon in Ithaca, New York. The task is ordinary, even pleasurable: repetitive physical work in an affluent, leafy neighborhood. Then a white couple stop their car. The woman calls the man over and asks whether he would like another job. In a few seconds, an everyday scene becomes something much larger. The man is not a gardener looking for work. He is Grant Farred, a professor at Cornell University, and the garden is his own. Yet the woman’s question carries an assumption about who he is, what kind of work he does, and where a Black man apparently belongs in the social order. Farred’s account of this encounter becomes the starting point for a remarkable exploration of race, memory, language, and thinking.