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partnership’s new hospital. Since Otis’ wage was almost double the one he’d received from the Cervenkas, they wished him well, never acknowledging the hardship his leaving must have caused. My grandfather moved Otis behind his house into a cottage that before the Civil War had housed field slaves. Ten years later, Otis’ seventeen-year-old bride, Ruby, moved in and worked as my grandparents’ maid.
    During the early 1950s, my grandfather would coax Otis, who was then in his nineties, to describe his years as Houston’s servant. “Oh, no, Doctor, shame on you,” he’d say. The older Otis got, the more he spoke to my grandfather in exaggerated dialect. He’d shake his white head, his mouth disappearing behind a white mustache, his black eyebrows balancing his light-toned face. People guessed his age at around seventy. “Don’t you know,” he’d add, “these poor people gots to be tired of an old man’s gibberish?” Then he’d disappear. Unfazed, my grandfather would point toward the empty hallway. “Abigail and I,” he’d say, “are now blessed to have this good and faithful servant taking care of our family.” He actually said it: servant .
    That Otis was not the person I knew. He taught my brothers and me to make whistles from blades of grass, the vibrations tickling, and to fertilize plants with eggshells and limp banana peels splayed like starfish under the surface soil. He showed Sam how to feed a baby pigeon with an eyedropper, and how to fold an origami dove with wings that flapped when he pulled the tail. He also told me his Master Sam stories, memories no one else mentioned and I kept to myself. Now, I hope they weren’t revisions, given condescendingly, like he would have to my grandfather to accommodate an expected version of his life. After all, my fascination with his slave experience was, to say the least, imprudent. I longed for a connection to a historical figure. And I wanted to know why Otis could be devoted to his slave owner but contemptuous of my grandfather, a man I’d been taught to revere.
    Two of Otis’ stories were favorites, and I’d often beg for them. “Not now, child,” he’d always begin. “Don’t bother an old man.” But that was his signal for me to plead. I’d pull him a chair, usually at the backyard wrought iron table, and he’d sit, then poke at one of his hearing aids, his tongue clicking as loud as a mockingbird. Sometimes, he’d tell me to get Sam, but Sam was always off somewhere with Kurt.
    In his first story, the chief of a Texas branch of the Coushatta tribe complained about the Confederate government’s mandatory draft, which forced Native Americans to travel to Virginia to fight in a war they didn’t understand. “Chief Billie Blount brung along twenty of his men, and Master Sam, he met them down at the big spring,” Otis would say. We shucked corn, throwing husks into a bucket, or his fist—the knuckles gray as if mud had caked there—whittled a piece of mesquite, his pocketknife curling thin strips into wooden bows. “Mrs. Houston wouldn’t allow them to step foot into her house ’cause she never forgot about that princess of his.”
    Otis couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk about Houston’s previous years with the Cherokees in Arkansas, except to say that his hero had become a chief and had married the first wife. I imagined Houston, his face streaked in red and yellow paint, wearing a headdress, leading his whooping men down a ravine into battle while smoke rose amidst the shuffle of hooves. Years later, I read that the princess-wife had been Will Rogers’ ancestor and that the general’s adventure had apparently included a protracted drinking and peyote binge. Nothing in my research, however, reconciled Otis’ devotion. Houston had been a colorful figure all right, but he’d refused to give my friend his freedom.
    “After they’d smoked,” Otis continued, “I brung Master Sam his foolscap paper, and a big pot of pokeweed ink,