“There were lots of good lines. True insights. One of my favorites was something your uncle said. The one they called Catfish? About how being from Mississippi makes you different.”

She smiles. “Mississippi blood. That part?”

“That’s it.”

A distant fondness comes into Serenity’s eyes, and she quotes her uncle word for word: “I been all over the South, man. Cutting pulpwood and playing the blues. Mississippi blood is different. It’s got some river in it. Delta soil, turpentine, asbestos, cotton poison. But there’s strength in it, too. Strength that’s been beat but not broke. That’s Mississippi blood.”

“That says it, right there,” I tell her. “‘Beat but not broke.’”

“It’s a lot more poetic than ‘Mississippi exceptionalism.’”

We share a laugh, and somehow this mutual appreciation of our common history banishes the awkwardness of being alone without really knowing each other.

“You remind me of another writer,” I tell her. “He’s not from the South, but he had a black father and a white mother.”

“James McBride?”

“How did you know?”

She clucks her tongue once. “A lot of people say that. If McBride wasn’t so damned good, I’d be offended.”

“Because my first point of comparison is a mixed-race writer, and not just Carson McCullers or Eudora Welty?”

“Of course. But I get it. I’m not naïve.”

“It was McBride’s prose I was thinking of. The gift for detail.”

“You don’t have to dig yourself out of a hole.”

“I wasn’t . . . shit, okay.”

Serenity stops her slow progress along the shelf and takes out a volume by Shelby Foote. She looks at the title page, then slides it back in.

“So how does it feel to win the National Book Award?” I ask.

“Pretty damn good, I won’t lie. How does it feel to sell millions of books?”

“Not bad.” We share another laugh. “Maybe we all want what we don’t have,” I suggest.

“Touché.”

At last she turns away from the bookshelf and sits down in the Eames chair where I read her galley last night. After testing the cushion, she lifts her shapely legs onto the ottoman and crosses them.

“I guess you’re wondering what I’m doing here, right? Natchez, I mean.”

“Well . . . you’re friends with Keisha.”

“I am. But that’s not all of it. Maybe not even most of it. I want to get justice for Keisha, yes. But I’m really here because of the larger story.”

“Which story, exactly?”

Her dark eyes focus on mine to the exclusion of all else. “Your story. Or your family’s. Your father and Viola. Does that surprise you?”

“Ah . . . yes. A little.”