“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.

That night, after Peter left, Mama said three prayers: one for Ben Daisy and one for his sister, and the final one for Daisy herself. “May her spirit finally rest.” And then I watched as she took her ledger down, the one she’d been keeping her notes in about the experiment, and, with her pen, scratch something out, write something new on the page. Then she tore the whole page out of the book altogether and took it with her to her bedroom, and I never saw it again.