Lord Clyde, though, was the big draw. He did only two shows a night, at eight and nine-thirty. By now, someone else would have taken over for him as Satan at Hell Gate. Clyde spent his winters on an island off the South Carolina coast, fishing and crabbing, took the train up to New York City for an occasional show in Harlem.

“I got a good life,” he’d told Pin. “No matter I’m colored or a white man, it’s a good-enough life.”

She went around back and slipped inside the door used by the performers.

The door to Clyde’s dressing room was open, and she saw him lacing one elegant black goatskin shoe. In a bamboo cage, a trio of white doves fluttered as she walked in. Clyde glanced up and nodded.

“You staying out of trouble, boy?”

He picked a white feather from his dress trousers and stood. He was the tallest man she’d ever known, also one of the best looking. After each performance, he did a brisk business selling photographs of himself, to Negroes and even some white people. Pin had one tacked to the wall of the shack, alongside a picture of the dead aviator Harriet Quimby:

LORD CLYDE, THE HOO-DOO KING, MASTER OF MYSTIC AMAZEMENT

He’d signed it To Pin, with regards, in an expansive, swooping hand. She’d spent an afternoon copying the way he’d written her name, in hopes she might develop a star’s signature, too.

“Doing my best,” she said. She watched as Clyde straightened his celluloid collar—a new collar for every show, an extravagance Pin couldn’t even imagine. Ikie said Clyde and his family lived in a house with four bedrooms and an indoor toilet, down in Bronzeville.

“What do you want, boy?” Clyde shrugged into his jacket, picked up his bow tie, and looped it around his neck. “Cat got your tongue?”

“Were you working Hell Gate a few hours ago?”

He nodded. “I was.”

“Did you see a man in one of the boats with a girl? About four o’clock, I think. A white man with a white girl.”

“I see a lot of white men with a lot of white girls.” Clyde’s voice was so deep he didn’t need a megaphone. Pin once heard a grown man shriek like a woman when Clyde reared out of the darkness at Hell Gate and brandished his pitchfork, shouting Welcome, sinner! “You talking about a little girl, or a grown woman?”

“No, a girl. Eleven or twelve, wearing a yellow dress. Big yellow bow in her hair.”

“You know how many girls in yellow dresses I see every day in Riverview? Five hundred and ninety-seven. And that’s just white girls. How come you asking?”

“This man, when he got into the boat, he had a girl with him. When he came out of the tunnel, he didn’t. He was alone.”