And the five of us—me, Lucien, Madame Elizabeth, Mama, and Miss Hannah—put our cloaks on to walk through the dusk to Culver’s back room.

I did not understand then. Can a child, who has so few memories, no history of her own, know what it is to be haunted? To understand a ghost is to have an understanding of time that is not possible for a child. Children can feel spirits, but they do not discriminate between the living and the dead the way adults do. For them, it is all the living. And so I did not understand the look of anguish on Mama’s face as we got closer to the reunion, and I did not understand why Miss Hannah was so angry at a dead woman, and I still did not understand why I felt so sad around Mr. Ben.

But I was about to learn.

The only people allowed in Culver’s back room were newcomers. More and more often, new people were appearing—not just the ones brought by Madame Elizabeth, but those who found us on their own. If you saw an unrecognizable face in town, someone new walking down the roads, who tried to stay close to the underbrush so that they could run, we all knew to send that person first to Culver’s. In those days, you did not ask about the past of the newly arrived. They’d stay for a few nights, and then they would find a room or take a lot from one of the deacons of our church and put together a home of their own.

It was not families who arrived like this. It was mostly men. We welcomed them, of course, and most of them eventually settled in. But a few of them, maybe four or five, never fully joined us. Even after they’d found places to live and women to love, they still returned to the back of Culver’s pharmacy to meet up with those most like themselves.

The back-room visitors would sit and watch Culver work. It was where Culver mixed up the different-colored remedies of his shop. He poured each one into the saltmouth and tincture glass bottles, as tall as a child.

Culver sold the back-room people beer and rum, even though we were a dry town. But the deacons and Reverend Harland pretended not to know Culver’s back room, only obliquely mentioning it in their sermons, and Culver was careful that only colored people drank there. The few times white men tried to come and sit, they just saw Culver painstakingly measuring out the granules and liquids that turned the remedies their necessary hue.

Like every child in our village, I knew the people of the back room well. All had been christened with their own nicknames, which we sang to them. The people of Culver’s back room had all lost themselves. They had returned in their minds back to the places they’d run from, the places they didn’t name, even to their fellow travelers. So maybe when the boys yelled at them and the girls braided their names into song, we were trying to call them back to us. At least, that’s what I tell myself now. The alternative hurts too much to bear.