“This it?” Mr. Ben said.

Sampson Lane had reached the crossroads, where the main road stretched to downtown and the waterfront—the journey most people who lived here made every dawn and dusk for their livelihood. In the other direction, the road stretched deeper into Kings County, to the farms some of us worked. The final fork spread south. Around us was some of the land cleared for fields, the cabins and houses built close together so that neighbors could share gardens and animals and conversation.

There was the schoolhouse, which was empty now, because it was spring and most children were working. It would start up classes again in a few weeks, when they returned, and I would sit there, too, away from Mama.

There was the low, rambling building that was Mr. Culver’s pharmacy. His son, John, was regularly running from Mama’s to here, passing messages between the two of them. Out front sat six glass vials, filled to the brim with blue and green and red liquid remedies—the sign to all, even those of us who did not know our letters, that Culver’s was a place for medicine. I knew the front room well. Culver’s also was our general store, where we could buy seed and burlap and thread from a welcoming face, not the begrudging white ones downtown who sold the same, at two times the price for colored people.

And finally, there was the church, the building everyone was proudest of. It had been the first one built, after our grandfathers bought land here, and it stood back, next to a little glen of trees we took turns pruning to keep pretty, and the graveyard shaded lower on the hill, protected from any passerby.

Mr. Ben looked around. “This it, then?” he repeated.

“We play over there,” I said, pointing to the other side of the churchyard, where in the summertime a meadow always sprang up, which I and the other children liked to run through. In this new spring, it was bare, but I tried to explain it to him, what the future glory would look like. “We run so hard there you feel like you’re bursting.”

His face was unmoved.

“But I guess it’s all just mud now,” I said, trailing off.

A crow called above us, wheeled in the sky, and settled on the branch of the nearest tree, shaking a too-new blossom loose.

Mr. Ben said, “I couldn’t see what this place looked like on the way in. I could only hear what this town was like, when I was in that box.”

“What was it like?” I said. “In there.”

“Awful, gal. What kind of a question is that? What you think it like, to be shut up in the dark with nothing but yourself all around you?”

He made another turn, looked up at the sky again, which seemed too white and was closing in around us.

I was seized with the wild desire for him to love our home as much as I did. He had said he was lonely for his Daisy, but maybe he was lonely because of being in the box, of having been so close to her in death but then being snatched away to rise up. I knew part of making a guest feel comfortable was to introduce them to those they might have something in common with. That is what they taught us girls in deportment at the Sunday school, anyways. And he seemed to enjoy talking about the dead. I pointed to the churchyard again.

“That’s where my daddy is,” I said. “Mama’s sister, too. They’re dead like your Daisy. Like you were. ’Cept Mama couldn’t bring them back. She did that for you, though.”

He looked at me from the corner of his eye and smiled slightly. “They all in there, then?” he said.

“Yeah.” I thought about it for a minute. “Not all of ’em, though. Mama’s sister’s hair, it lives in the glass jar in the parlor. But all of my daddy’s in there.”

Mr. Ben nodded. He was quiet for a moment, and then he spit in disgust on the ground. “I don’t even know Daisy’s resting place.”

He limped to the middle of the crossroads, turning first in one direction, then the other. He looked up above him again, at the sky. Then he said, “Let’s go back to your mother’s.” And so we did.

He allowed me, though, the kindness of slipping my hand in his as we walked back home.

DINNER WAS EATEN in near silence. Mr. Ben seemed to be thinking still of our trip to town, and Mama, she ate not for pleasure but for utility. She often said that if it was not for Lenore, I would not know good cookery at all. She seemed to notice that there was a sadness around Mr. Ben, because she said, at the end of a meal where the sole talk was between our tin spoons scraping our plates, “Is everything all right, then?”

He looked up at her, hard, for a minute. So hard Mama startled.

Then he looked back down at his plate and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

It was my job to clear the table, to take everything to the basin of water Lenore always left, her last duty before the end of the day. So I did not hear how it started between them, only how it ended.

I had taken our plates and come back for the pitcher when I saw Mr. Ben by the parlor mantelpiece, running his hand along it. Mama was still at the table. She had taken out her accounting ledger for the day. She was back in the world of her mind.

Mr. Ben ran his fingers along the family Bible that sat there, then over the little mirror in a gold frame that Mama displayed and the bowl where Lenore put cut blossoms from the tulip tree outside. He skipped over the jar with the braids in it. His fingers next ran over a pile of newsprint.

“What’s this?” he said.

Mama glanced up over the greasy spectacles on her nose, narrowed her eyes. “Ah, that? That is our newspaper. They print it once a month. It has lots for sale, and news of the church. And here …” Mama got up to stand beside Mr. Ben.

“I can’t cipher,” he said.

“Of course,” Mama said. “But, you see, there’s a primer in the back.”

She rustled the pages to the very end. She held her hand over the paper and read aloud the print there. “See? This part are words to learn. ‘Free.’ ‘Life.’ ‘Live.’ ‘Took.’ ‘Love.’ ‘Loves.’ ‘Man.’ ‘Now.’ ‘Will.’ ‘Thank.’ ‘God.’ ‘Work.’ ‘Hard.’ ‘House.’ ‘Land.’ ‘Made.’ ‘Slaves.’”

With each word she spoke, I saw him wince, as if the words had pricked his finger.

“And these,” Mama said, “are the sentences to learn. ‘I am free and well.’ ‘I will love God and thank Him for it.’ ‘And I must work hard and be good and get me a house and lot.’”

“‘Work hard,’” he said.

“Yes.”

It was quiet between them for a bit, only the fire crackling.

Then Mr. Ben panted out, as if it was taking him great effort to do so, “There was a nigger back in Maryland who learned how to cipher. You wanna know how he learned, Miss Doctor?”

“How?”

“He took pot liquor fat and dipped pages of the Bible in ’em. Dipped ’em in till the pages was clear through. Greased the Word and hid it underneath his hat, and that clever, pretty nigger walked around with the Bible fat on his head, and if any white man saw it, he wouldn’t know it as the word of God. He’d only see some greasy, dirty papers on a nigger’s head and leave ’im be.”

“Well, that’s marvelous,” Mama said gravely. “That’s quite beautiful.”

“You think?” Mr. Ben sucked in a gulp of air, cleared his throat loudly. “I always thought it was a whole lot of work. But”—he pointed at the newspaper held between them—“we must work hard and be good even in freedom. That’s what you telling me. With rules like that, don’t it make you wonder what freedom’s for?”

He let his fingers run along the mantel again, from the Bible, to the mirror, to the flowers and back again, skipping over the newsprint.

“You got so many pretty things, Miss Doctor,” he said. “Such pretty things. My Daisy was the same way. She kept three stones she’d found: pink ones, and a white one, too. And a shell she’d found down by the wharf. She even had a mirror like this,” he held up the mirror and set it down again. “She wanted one something fierce. ’Course, she didn’t need one. My eyes were enough of a mirror for her, I told her. But she said no, she needed a mirror. To see herself. First thing she bought with the money from her market garden, even before she tried to save for freedom. She loved looking at herself in that thing. Sometimes, I’d have to beg her to put it down so my Daisy would talk to me.”

He picked up the mirror at last, cradled it in his palm. “Do you think someone like that belongs in freedom?” Mr. Ben said. “I mean, if she’d lived to make it here. Do you think she would have been able to work hard and have her lot of land to earn her freedom, like that paper says?”

“We all work hard,” Mama said. “I do not follow what you mean, Mr. Ben.”