“Little Ida, Jasmine’s mother, was very black with exquisitely fine features and tiny black eyes. She married a white man when she was pretty mature, and, after his death from cancer, she came back here with Jasmine and Lolly and Clem. She was my nurse or nanny till she died, Little Ida, sleeping with me till I was thirteen, and then dying in my bed.

“What I’m telling you now, this story of the Blackwood family, is what has come down to me from Jasmine and Lolly and Little Ida and Big Ramona, who is Little Ida’s mother, as well as from Aunt Queen, or Pops or Sweetheart. Jasmine has an eye for ghosts, as I’ve said, and I’m always afraid she’s going to realize I’m not really alive, but so far it hasn’t happened. And I hang on to my family like a pit bull.

“But to return to my story, if it hadn’t been for the fabled Ora Lee and Jerome, little William and Camille might have drowned in the swamp or starved from inattention.

“As to salaries for his hired help, Manfred couldn’t be bothered with any such thing, only heaving fistfuls of money into a big bowl in the kitchen. Jerome had to see that the man wasn’t robbed, and the keep of William and Camille and all the farmhands was provided for.

“The farm had its own chickens and cows in those days, and horses of course, and a fine carriage or two parked right beside the new automobiles in the back shed.

“But Manfred never bothered with anything but one black gelding, which he sometimes came ashore to ride back and forth across the broad lawns and pastures of Blackwood Farm, shouting and murmuring and cursing to himself, and declaring to his groom (most probably the versatile Jerome) that he was never going to die and join Virginia Lee, not until centuries had passed, that he would roam the earth, shivering from her death and honoring her memory.

“All this I learned by rote as you can tell.

“One spring day several years after Manfred had become a widower, carpenters and lumber were brought to the property, and the slow process of building the mysterious Hermitage on Sugar Devil Island began.

“Nothing but the finest kiln-dried cypress was seen to go off by pirogue into the swamp, in one small load at a time, along with a great quantity of other materials, including an iron stove and a great amount of coal, and only workmen from ‘away’ went out there to build, workmen who would go ‘away’ when the work was done, which is what those workmen did, solemnly afraid of uttering a word as to the location of the island, or what had been their specific tasks.