“His father was a Seminole. Couple of hundred years ago there was a freedman’s colony outside of St. Augustine, on the northeast coast of Florida. It was a popular destination for runaways and free people of color alike.”

“Why? I thought most runaways headed north.”

“Back then Florida was more old-Spain than slaveholding Dixie. The Spaniards were fairly tolerant as long as you went through the motions of being Catholic, and the Seminoles who lived nearby were friendly with the Africans. The free colony was destroyed when the British made a move on St. Augustine, but at any rate, there was a great deal of intermarriage. That’s where John Gray came from.”

I turned the page and scanned the text. Brian summarized and paraphrased behind me.

“John made a nasty mix of his mother’s Hundun and his father’s native ways. No one knows how powerful he really was, but between his magic and his charisma he gained a small cult of followers who called themselves Graysmen. Eventually the Spaniards had enough of him—he was accused of killing a priest or something. Who knows if it was true, but they hunted him down for it and killed him in 1840.”

“That must have been a blow to his followers.”

“Yes and no. They stayed in a loose alliance for some time after his death. When are you thinking your family members might have been involved with him?”

I had to calculate a rough time frame. It took me a second. “Maybe twenty years after the Civil War. Maybe the 1880s or ’90s. I’m not sure.”

Brian’s head bobbed quickly to the left in a half shrug. “I don’t know when they officially disbanded—or even if they ever did, honestly, but they were being harassed by the police as late as 1882. A round of them got hung for witchcraft, of all things. Of course the official charge was something more ordinary, but everyone knew why they really got them.”

I leaned forward against the counter and pressed my chin into my palms. “But why? Why after all that time? What did John Gray promise them to make them keep his memory alive so long?”

“What everyone who wants a cult promises: eternal life.”

“I hate to harp on the obvious, but he died”

“He was killed, yes, but he hadn’t told anyone that he personally could make them live forever. He had this idea he got from his mother; there’s some potion, or formula, or powder, or something, that a true wizard could concoct. Unfortunately for him, he never managed to get the right combination of ingredients mixed up. The trouble was, most of his recipes called for plants that grow in Africa, so he was forced to substitute. It’s not quite the same thing as swapping apple juice for sugar, I don’t imagine.”

“But his cultists believed he’d work it out?”