Horace, who as I said before, is right as we speak, as you read, if you turn these pages, trying desperately to change himself into something—anything else—with powers we dare not speak of; with answers he has braided together from the very book cousin/uncle Jimmy sites to counter his cousin/nephew’s waxing, confusing desires. Even as Jimmy wants to make room for Horace’s exploration, he is still a pastor and parishioner, mourning his inability to allow his own curiosity to dig him deeper into the murky and unknowable mire that is life. Maybe that’s why his wife strayed? Maybe that’s why his little cousin Horace is a . . . He can’t even say it. “You know as well as I what the Bible says” is Jimmy’s occupational answer to Horace’s inquiry on same-sex love. For Horace, the clarity of damnation in that question still eludes his thirst for answers.

It would be something if this novel were a tome of thoughts and ideas from antiquity that save us from ourselves today. No lie, I wished it were, the twenty-year-old who first read this book sped through it and devoured it hoping its passages of longing and family misunderstandings—the quiet moments of surrender between the one you wished you could love and the one who loves you—all I hoped would be answered or explained away at the end of this book, pointing out the concise answer of “why?” But then how would Mr. Kenan get us to come back, keep us coming back? Keep us revisiting.

I have reread this book every two years (sometimes twice in a year) since 2001. I reread and I remember and sometimes I reflect. These hauntings, these revisits, are all fueled by beautiful questions Mr. Kenan gifted us and cast us not as scholars or simply readers but as the curious; it’s the reason he talks directly to us and reminds us, through monologue of gentle inquiry, what Black life in the South was like prior to the cellphone. “But you’ve seen this, haven’t you?”

It’s as if he wants us to secretly nod to each other over these quandaries heavy in our heart or gather, huddle around this story’s puzzle pieces together, finding and putting them next to each other, ultimately illuminating a work that feels foreign and all too familiar. Because there will be some, they come and they come, with questions like Horace, some will be curious like Jimmy, and even some will have questions like Aunt Ruth, the oldest living relative of Horace and Jimmy, though she makes sure they remember their kinship is through marriage, not by blood. Even she is wondering where the road turned. Some reads, you wish the characters would look around at all the gathered spirits and know that they are not alone in their questioning. We are not alone. Mr. Kenan makes sure we know it.