In the following weeks, he did not go to work with the other men anymore. He did not leave his bed in the room he shared with Miss Hannah. He even stopped saying that name. He became a ghost. When Mama tried to talk to Miss Hannah about it, she would only shake her head and say, “I don’t know, Miss Doctor,” before walking away.

One Saturday night, Pete Back Back came to Mama’s door. He would not sit in her big leather chair, only stood in the middle of her examination room.

“Ben finally left his bed last night. Agreed to have a tipple with me,” Pete said. “We drunk from Friday night into this morning. Culver threw us out at dawn. Said we was unruly. So we walked to the waterfront downtown.

“We stood on the wharves. We looked at the ferries. I got paid Friday, so I still had a few coins in my pocket. The wind was blowing the stink of the river into our faces, but we was happy. We was the closest thing to free any nigger’s ever been,” Peter told us. He stopped for a minute, his eyes wet.

“We went to go sit down by the water, to rest awhile. We was going to sit on the bank, near the wharves, when suddenly Ben Daisy lifted his head. All around us, we could smell flowers. I swear to you, Doctor, the air changed. The wind coming off the river was so soft and warm. Ben, he caught a whiff of that water, and he looked up and out across the dark river. He smiled. And then he bolted.

“Before I could stop him, he ran to the end of the wharf, calling ‘Daisy!’ He leapt into the river, and the water closed around him. And he was gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?” Mama said.

“I tried to call someone to help me get him out.” Peter rubbed at his shoulder. “Some of the kids who live by the wharf, they dived into the water to try and find him. Dived in right after him, they did, but when one of the boys came back up, he only said Ben Daisy was gone, and then they all scrambled out of the water, as if they’d took a fright. That boy wouldn’t tell me what he saw down there, but none of them would go back in, even when I begged them to.”

Pete Back Back took something out from underneath his shirt. “Only this was still there, floating on top of the waves.”

It was Ben Daisy’s hat, the pink-and-white pansies I’d pressed for him still tucked into the band, the whole thing dry as bone.

“I can’t bring myself to tell Miss Hannah. So I stopped here first,” Pete Back Back said. He still would not meet Mama’s eye.