My father had two sons, and one of us was doomed to be an orphan. Looking back over our lives, I’m glad it was Lincoln. But now I understand something I did not before: that the happiness of my childhood was bought with the pain of a black boy who had hurt no one. Tonight that grown-up boy is driving northward, following the twisting river and the dark old vein of Highway 61 as far as Cairo, Illinois; there he’ll shoot straight up Interstate 55 to Chicago, where so many of his ancestors fled before him.

We are brothers, Lincoln and I—half brothers, anyway—and long after my father passes from this earth, his blood will flow through both our veins. The genes of Northern Europe are my legacy, and my destiny, but Lincoln carries the genes of both Europe and Africa within him. I hope that someday he can free himself from the lies that shrouded his youth and become what Viola must have dreamed he could when she carried him down the streets of that cold and unfamiliar city: a man who embodies the best of both his parents. With a father who chose the cruel path of duty and a mother who chose martyrdom, who deserves it more?

I’m sitting in a rocking chair on the gallery of Edelweiss, waiting for Annie to come home from school. After deciding she was ready to rejoin her classmates at St. Stephen’s, my daughter also declared that from now on we should live in the house that Caitlin had intended to share with us. I wasn’t so sure, but I’m willing to try anything that gives Annie a sense of control over her life. With my father in prison in the Mississippi Delta and my mother traveling there every week, Caitlin’s ghost is a welcome force in our lives—at least for the time being.

Annie brought a few of Caitlin’s things to the new house: a favorite coat that’s a little too big for her, Caitlin’s laptop, mementos of vacations we took together. Mounted above the fireplace in Annie’s room is Caitlin’s Pulitzer Prize, the award she won for her coverage of the Delano Payton case. John Masters sent it to Annie the week after Caitlin’s funeral, with a written note expressing the hope that she would work as hard as Caitlin had to reach her dreams. I hope the same thing; I only pray that Annie doesn’t have to pay as high a price to attain them.