Ben Daisy sighed. “Night is when it all catches up with me,” he said.

Mama instructed him to return the following afternoon, and for every afternoon after that for five days. “You see how you feel,” she told him. “And if it seems to help, tell your friends down at Culver’s. It may help them, too.”

When he’d left, she sat and began to dictate to me again.

“We have in our midst,” she said, “a group of men, and a few women, who, upon discovering our community and life here in freedom, find their souls still oppressed. Their bodies are here with us in emancipation, but their minds are not free. Their spirits have not recovered from the degradation of enslavement, despite the many hardships and privations they have suffered to come here.

“Indeed, I argue that it is precisely because of these hardships and privations that when they arrive here, with us, some part of them does not return. When they arrive, I can treat the physical effects of their enslavement—the yaws in their limbs, and the scars on their backs and heads, and the bones that broke and were never set. But I have, up until now, not been able to treat what would be called the mental effects, the spiritual effects, which do not respond to prayer or clean living or even the embrace of friends.

“I believe the root cause for this is an intense solitude and loneliness, even in their freedom. At least, that is how some of them have described it to me. We have seen this illness before,” she said. “In the cases of those we love, like Mr. Ruggles and Miss Sojourner Truth. They were afflicted by this deep and abiding loneliness even in freedom and took to drink, and then the water cure, lying in bathtubs and wrapped in cold, wet sheets to try and soak it out. And it has not done much for them. If all these good and kind warriors are felled by this disease of feeling, what hope is there for any of us?

“And what is at the root cause of loneliness? It is a lack of love. I believe if we can treat this deficit of affection, we can begin to see an improvement in those new to freedom. We can make them whole in both body and in spirit and see a real change in their condition. They will ingest this substance, which is made of the solitude and longing for love of the ocean, and it will rebalance what has been made unsteady inside them. Take Mr. Ben, who is lost in amorousness, who is able to do nothing but pine. We will realign his affections, so that he no longer loves what is dead but loves us here, the living. He will be filled with agape. He will love his fellow man. It is what I attempt to test, in my proving. He will be my first patient.”