Eventually, Meriday became pregnant.

I never knew what to make of it. I’ve seen glimpses of her growing belly. She was so young, a teenager, but beautiful, glowing with pride, imbued with the gift of creation.

Meriday gave birth to a son who was fortuitously pale—pale enough to pass as white. She named him Lucius.

I know he was able to live as a white man for the whole of his life—that he never told anyone who his mother was. I know, because Lucius was my great-great-grandfather.

I wish I could go back in time and kill August. Julian, I think, you killed the wrong Wakefield. He was an evil man, and hasn’t the world had enough of evil men?

As I leave this hallway behind for my own room, I think of Clementine when she came limping stiffly out of the swamp, dripping with muddy water, her skin sodden, her eyes gleaming like reflected fire. I think of her final words to Meriday: I will protect you from what will happen to you. If you come with me, we can stop it.

Clementine, who could see the future, must have known what would happen between her daughter and August, must have seen Meriday’s attempts at refusal, the consent she was obliged to give, for to refuse him might have meant death or imprisonment. It was the same fear Clementine had carried with her from John Garrow’s plantation, the thing she was trying to save Meriday from all along.

But she must have known, too, that Meriday would give birth, and that her son would have children, and on and on, and eventually, somewhere down the line, a boy would be born, a boy unlike any other, a boy who could see Clementine for what she really was.

Safely back in my own room with the door shut, I pull out my father’s journal and open it to the desperate pencil scratches of its final entries. By this point he has been scribbling circles, spirals, zeros, onto the paper, filling them in with so much pressure that the page bubbles on the other side, at several points making holes with the sharp pencil tip. These holes in the paper, for some reason, concern me the most.

Will he tell me what he saw in the locked room? Can I comprehend what is really in there, what Jonah experienced when he was locked inside? What did my father see that so broke him, that made him commit the ultimate final act of his life?

Do I really want to know?