If anyone had asked me to guess what sort of house Jesse Jameson Williams had lived in, I would have pictured a Frank Lloyd Wright contemporary hugging a hillside. And I would have been wrong. Lisa pulled into the long driveway of a huge, two-story Victorian with double-tiered porches decorated with elaborate white railings. The whole front of the house looked like it was covered in white lace, and a garden, alive with color, stretched the entire width of the house.

“This was Jesse’s house?” I asked, surprised.

“The De Claire house,” Lisa said as we got out of her car. “A man named Byron De Claire was the first owner when it was built in 1880. My parents bought it in 1980.”

I followed Lisa to the front door and into the house, which showed its age only in the Victorian architecture. As Lisa turned off the elaborate-looking security system, I peered into the rooms I could see from where I stood. The foyer, living room, and parlor were painted in muted pastels: seafoam, and lavender, and blue-tinged gray. Artwork adorned every wall, and while Lisa talked on her phone inside the front door, I moved from painting to painting in the huge foyer, almost afraid to breathe near them. I recalled reading somewhere that one of Jesse Williams’s paintings went for ten million dollars at an auction, and here I was, surrounded by several of them at one time. Most of the work was his, but I spotted two of Romare Bearden’s collages and a huge painting by Judith Shipley of young girls sitting in a field of daisies. I quickly searched the Shipley for the iris the artist always hid in her paintings, a tribute to her mother by the same name, but with all those daisies, I soon gave up and turned my attention to one of the Bearden collages instead. It was full of African-American musicians, mainly guitarists, standing against a vivid red background. I felt a thrill of excitement that I was close enough to these original paintings to touch. Maybe I wasn’t much of an artist, but I would always love art itself.

“Come in the kitchen,” Lisa said, getting off her call.

I followed her into the spacious white-and-stainless-steel kitchen.

“Didn’t Jesse Williams—didn’t your father—live in New York most of his life?” I asked.