“My father used to leave in the morning, on horseback, with two plowboys. The three horses would set out, at a walk, to plow the uplands. As for little girls, you can’t expect them not to be women already. The youngest of the lot was Pitt, a boy who would have won your approval, who would win it still. Harold adores children. He’s always looked at them with a strict, probing eye, but at the same time, with such a peaceful expression on his face that they come up and touch his hand. My sister and Pitt and I used to say, ‘Harold is a healer.’ The fact that children understood this instinctively (I was seven, and my sister was nine), and that Harold would actually become a healer, in accordance with the wishes of the whole family, this will show you, better than anything, how all of us used to think along the same lines. And it will tell you about the character of our father, who would head out to the distant fields every day without saying a word but seeing everything.

“I didn’t say ‘doctor’ (I’m thinking about your ‘doctor’ from yesterday evening). Nothing was ‘doctoral’ with Harold, and nothing is now (he has a clinic for children, in a suburb of Birmingham). No, to put it simply, with his sternness and his silence, he’s a healer. He dispenses healing, because you see a heart drawn around him. And children see it much better than everybody else. He understood that, with children, he had the best chance to heal—above all, with poor children, who yearn for mysteries and never get to see any. So they get to see one, at last, in this man. And they recover. Or at least, from then on, they’re ready to recover.

“Pitt became his assistant. Pitt is delightful; I love Pitt. I like them all, but I love Pitt. He used to have a completely hilarious way of falling on his . . . yes . . . and afterward he would come up to you, aching all over, sincere as can be, and ask if it hadn’t hurt you! It looked like a joke, but he’d be excruciatingly concerned with your hands, your feet, your flanks, your crown of thorns. He’d shout, ‘Watch out! They’re going to bring you a sponge soaked in vinegar.’ He’s always worried about the harm that other people can do to you through him. He’s three years younger than me. He looks like me. I love him.

“I didn’t know my other brother very well. Nobody else did, for that matter. He’s the perfect vessel for what people in our part of the country call ‘the silence of the Whites.’ Of the male Whites . . . because, here and now, right in front of you, this representative of the female Whites is talking. But talking in a way my brother never talked.

“Also near the house there was a huge oak, full of squirrels, owls, weasels, and little lizards. And there were my two skinny aunts, who always used to say to me, ‘How can you laugh, young lady?’ when I was laughing. Afterward they’d go off, stiff and shriveled, through the fields. We never knew what they intended to do there, except maybe to talk with the Lord, whom one of them called ‘Tom’ in a familiar way, for reasons we never knew. ‘It might be time now to teach these children about the love of Tom.’ ‘Love’ affected us deeply, my sister and me. She used to giggle under her sheets.