“I know I would never have stretched my mouth like that, but he did it often with his mouth, just to get a rise out of me.

“Then he vanished, completely vanished, and I started to bellow his name.

“My last distinct picture of that event is of all the women trying to comfort me, the four black women who were as gentle as my grandmother Sweetheart, and even Pops coming in, drying the rain off himself with a towel and asking what was wrong.

“I was hollering, ‘Goblin, Goblin,’ over and over again, and Goblin wouldn’t come back.

“A terror erupted in me as it always did when he would vanish, and how it was resolved then I don’t know.

“It’s dim, this memory, but it’s fixed because I remember the giant number three on the birthday cake, and everybody saying so proudly that I was three years old, and then Goblin being so strong and so full of spite.

“Also Pops gave me a harmonica on that birthday and taught me how to blow in it, and I sat with him and we played together for a little while, and ever after we did that in the evenings right after supper before Pops headed up early to bed.

“What comes next is a series of memories of Goblin and me playing together alone in my room. Happy, happy memories. We played at blocks, with a marvelous set full of columns and arches, creating buildings of a vague classical bent to be sent crashing down, and for the purpose of crashing and banging we had fine little fire trucks and automobiles, but sometimes we just did the crashing with our hands or feet.

“Goblin didn’t have the strength to do it on his own right away, but over time he acquired it, but before that he would take my left hand to do it, or to roll the fire truck into our marvelous structures, and then he’d smile, and break loose of me, and dance about.

“My memory of these rooms is pretty clear. Little Ida, Jasmine’s mother, slept in the big bed with me, as I was already too old for a crib, and Goblin slept with us, and this room here was the playroom and filled with toys of all kinds.

“But I was easy with Goblin and he had no reason to be mean.

“And gradually, in spite of my young age, I began to see that Goblin didn’t want to share me with the world, and was happiest, by far, when he had my full attention, which made him strong.