When that panel blinked with light, the building wasn’t called St. Catherine’s, but the Jefferson Davis Memorial Hospital, after the president of the Confederacy. Back then, there were eighty doctors in Natchez, and the city thrummed with life. But as times changed, the name of the hospital changed, too. Sometime in the 1980s, when I was practicing law in Houston, it became St. Catherine’s, named for the nearby creek that the Natchez Indians lived along before they were slaughtered by the French who settled here. Today there are less than forty doctors in Natchez, thanks to bad tort laws, medical turf wars, and a moribund oil industry. And I am the mayor of what remains.

Bending at the waist, I squint at the faded letters on the few labels that remain. To my amazement, near the bottom left corner, I see Thomas Cage, M.D.

As I made my journey from the ER to this exit door, every few steps carried me past a portrait of a chief of staff gone by. The most recent twenty or so hang in the lobby, but my father was chief back in 1972, so his portrait resides in this forgotten corridor. I wonder if the other visages I passed concealed secrets like my father’s behind their dignified masks. Some did, perhaps. But most of those faces probably hid the usual small-town sins shared by men across America, regardless of race, religion, or section of the country.

My father was different. He couldn’t live blindly amid the ruins of a gilded empire where the lost children of Africa worked with false smiles among their former masters. So he thrust himself into the troubled borderland between black and white, and in his passion to do good, he did also what other passionate men had done who trod this deep soil made rich by sweat and blood. He strayed from his own kind, mingled his blood with the blood of Africa. That was common on this dark bend of the river, as it was across the South before Thomas Jefferson ever became a founding father. But my father’s offense was that he cared for the woman he bedded, and for her people, and in this atavistic corner of the New World he learned that the fearful, clannish Anglo-Saxons who’d settled it always exacted a price for such betrayal.

And blood and death followed.

I’m still staring at the old call panel when my phone pings with a text message. Rusty is waiting for me outside in his car. As I raise my arm to press the wide steel bar on the exit door, time slips, and I see my father walking through ahead of me, leaning into the steel to keep his frail body erect while he forces it open. When I was five years old, he could throw out one hand and swat this door open as though it were made of cardboard. Now . . .