Dinah announced in January the next year, much to everyone's surprise, that she was pregnant, expecting in May. She spent the next months being spoiled rotten by Victory, who fretted over her epilepsy and the pregnancy, receiving herbal morning sickness cures from Dixie, lengthy letters teaching child raising methods from Cobb, and boxes of frilly baby gifts from an elated Sunny. Since she and Fred had not yet ceased their relations, she naturally assumed it was his, though a niggling suspicion in the back of her mind cast a slight doubt on that reality. Fred had no doubt, but kept quiet, figuring his son was another man's kid too, so what would one more matter? Neither of them discussed their thoughts openly, and when Tammi Jean was born on Christmas Day, a bright blonde angel, Dinah declared it a miracle and Fred muttered under his breath, "more like a virgin birth." As with Peter, he abandoned the parenting to Dinah, who took her new baby to her breast in a glow of joy, her love rewarded with a bright, loving baby who charmed the family with her antics. Fred celebrated by going down to his favorite bar and getting rip roaring drunk, then weaving down the road to his girlfriend to give her a night she never forgot.
Dinah traveled to Ohio to show the baby to her grandfather, leaving Fred behind in Georgia. Jacob weakly took the little girl and played with her toes, amazed himself to have lived long enough to see his great grandchild and enjoying the sweet pleasure of holding a newborn. In some way that infused some new life in the old man, and he managed to pull himself out of bed to bring his wheelchair to the window, and sit with the baby in his lap, telling her all about the birds as they came to the feeder. Dinah and Dixie stood arm in arm and watched the pair, as the sun shone in his white hair and reflected off of the baby's golden head, and Dixie broke down into tears, the stress of Jacob's illness descending upon her in one moment of peace. Dinah decided to stay there for the summer, since the baby brightened Jacob and she felt the new life in the house was good for Dixie too, and the women spent happy evenings, catching fireflies for the baby to coo at and discussing how she would be raised a proper lady and presented to Society when she came of age.
While his sister learned to talk, Peter found himself learning a new dialect of English, having been bussed from the country to an inner city all black school in the interest of integration that fall in Ohio, having been transferred to the northern school with his mother helping to care for her grandfather. Dinah fought this with all she could muster, calling every politician she knew and a few judges too, but could not stop it, and watched her gifted son whisked off in a bus to a school rated lowest in the county, wondering if he would gain anything educational that year. Peter never told his mother that the buses were shot at and the white kids had to walk the gauntlet every morning between two rows of hooting blacks, who no more wanted the whites at their school than the newcomers wanted to be there. The original students noted derisively that the school had finally been painted and cleaned now the honkeys had arrived, and jeered at the new students, accusing them of being too frail and weak to be able to survive the school the way it had been.
Victory did learn of one run-in Peter had, when a big old girl who led a girls' gang stole Peter's wallet at phys ed and ran off with it, Peter in hot pursuit, catching up with the girl and snatching his wallet back. This led to a retaliation where the girls dragged him into the girls' room where the girl gathered her followers and ganged up on him in the cramped space, which smelled of illicit cigarettes, pot, and rank used feminine napkins, and threatened to cut his face, pulling out a knife. Peter kicked her in the crotch and ran, straight to the Principal's office, who hauled in the girl to for a show down. It didn't go exactly the way Peter expected, and he found himself sitting in Spanish class with the girl directly behind him an hour later, leaning forward to keep his bared neck away from her as the girl teasingly traced her pencil down it, whispering she was still going to cut him up, as if nothing had happened. He spent the rest of the year in the company of the tallest, nicest, queerest black boy he could befriend, and thus, with his bodyguard secure, survived.