Onstage, the actors nearest him provide every possible support. Those offstage crowd the wings, watching in friendly, nervous sympathy. He can see their eyes, the way they clasp their hands together as if praying for him. The audience, too, begins to pity the young boy, so obviously out of his depth, drowning in his own sleeves. Edwin can feel the change when it happens. He can feel the moment they start wanting him to succeed. He rides that change; it lifts him.

He has them on the edge of their seats, wondering if he’ll get through his next line, his next scene, his next thrust, his next parry. The play ends with Edwin’s first ovation. He won it merely by surviving.

—

In May, on Johnny’s thirteenth birthday, Mother and Father marry. Afterwards Edwin, Asia, and Johnny pretend to forget that Adelaide ever existed. They do their best to insist that the rest of the world do the same.

—

June, like his father before him, has abandoned his wife to run away with a younger woman. In July, he and Harriet run all the way to San Francisco, where they’ve been booked by the indomitable Jenny Lind Theatre. Destroyed repeatedly by fire, the Jenny Lind is being rebuilt yet again, even as they make their way to it.

During this same month, June’s nine-year-old daughter, Blanche, is sent from the chaos of her father’s abandonment to stay with the Booths in Baltimore. Blanche adores her grandmother. Her grandfather frightens her with his temper, his violence, his casual cruelty. One night, when the whole family has gathered for dinner, he suggests that Blanche isn’t really a Booth, that Clementina was already pregnant when she tricked June into marrying her. No real Booth was ever so stupid as this one, her grandfather says, waving a spoon in Blanche’s direction. He doesn’t even say this to Blanche herself. The comment is made across her to her gorgeous teenaged uncle Johnny.

—

In August, Edwin and John Sleeper put on an evening’s performance at the Bel Air Courthouse. The early program is high-minded, consisting of several Shakespearean soliloquies from Macbeth and Hamlet, but the audience prefers the minstrelsy that ends the evening—Edwin on the banjo, Sleeper on the bones, both of them singing Negro songs with their faces corked.

The response is so positive, they repeat the performance on a second night.

—

One of Johnny’s friends at school is a boy named Thomas Gorsuch. The Gorsuch plantation, Retreat Farm, is near the school and Johnny’s been a frequent guest there, eaten supper at that table, spent the night. He greatly admires Edward Gorsuch—“the finest of men”—so sober and prosperous, so little like his own father.

Two years earlier, four enslaved men had fled the Gorsuch plantation. Gorsuch fancies himself a kindly master. He tells everyone that they will return of their own accord.

He gets tired of waiting.