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appeared to me ? But I had no time for a murdered girl. My plan was to get the hell out of Dodge.
    When Tom came back for me, I was finished with the Times, at least for reading. I tucked the paper beneath my arm as he unlocked the cell door. By lantern light, he escorted me to the privy behind the jail. The privy was about the size of the average spirit cabinet. When I opened the door, I discovered it was just about as dark inside.
    â€œCan’t see a thing in here,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ll fall in.”
    He handed me the lantern, and I stepped in and closed the door behind me. I hung the lantern by its bale from a peg on the wall and then sat and waited.
    â€œTom, can you hear me?”
    â€œYes. Why?”
    â€œThen you’re too close,” I said. “Back away.”
    While I waited some more, the Times across my knees, I inspected the inside of the privy. There was the usual juvenile entertainment scratched into the wood: stick figures engaged in unspeakable acts, a limerick about a girl named Delores, a graffito Uncle Sam.
    Then I noticed something bulky down near my left ankle.
    I unhooked the lantern and brought it low.
    Tucked beneath the bench was an open gallon of red paint, with a brush stuck in it. I picked up the brush. The paint was still fresh enough to drip like molasses back into the can.

7
    My Tanté Marie was a firecracker of a woman, not five feet tall and so lean that her hands and wrists seemed like the skeletal fingers from one of the ghost stories she was always telling. She seemed ancient to me, but now I realize she must have been in her thirties. I never saw her in anything but a white cotton blouse, a long blue skirt, an apron around her waist, and a red bandana tied around her head. Beneath her blouse, she wore a necklace that had many strange and wonderful things on it: feathers, beads, bits of polished bone.
    My father bought her at a slave auction in New Orleans in 1840 or 1841, when Marie would have been about fourteen years old. My father, it is said, declared that she was the most spirited slave of them all, and a quadroon of exceptional beauty. He paid $630 in gold for her. It was years more before she was broken enough to be a house slave, about the time I was born, my uncle said. I don’t know about these things personally because my father died in 1848, the year of my birth, kicked to death by a horse. At least, that was what was assumed—he was found dead in the stable one Sunday morning, with his head stove in and an empty bottle of rum beside him.
    In her grief, my mother turned my raising over to Tanté Marie. I never grew close to my mother, who always seemed distant, shrouded in the crinoline trappings of antebellum Memphis society. She did not understand my passion for stories and books, my love of ghost stories and folklore, or the odd conversations I sometimes had with my bedroom mirror. I thought at the time that I hated her. But looking back, I realized she was no better and no worse than any of the other Memphis women of her age and time. It was the lack of otherness that I hated. It was as if I had been dropped into this strange life by accident, that perhaps I had been set adrift in a reed basket on the Mississippi and rode the wake of a packet boat up the Wolf River, that my real family would one day show up, clicking apologies in a strange tongue to claim me.
    More than anything, I wanted to belong.
    Then, three years after the cub pilot had pressed my name into his dying brother’s hand, I met Jonathan Wylde. Seven years older than me, Jonathan was a sensitive and handsome young man with a shock of blond hair, a free thinker who declared that women were the equal of men, that blacks were human beings, and that love survives death.
    I loved him from the start.
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    It was the January before the war, Jonathan was a divinity student at Stewart College, and we met at a stationer’s on Beale Street. We were