Despite Quentin’s injunction against bothering Dad, I feel an almost irresistible compulsion to do just that. The old lawyer might be content to let matters proceed at a glacial pace, but I can’t do that while Henry’s life hangs in the balance. For while the attack on the reporter might have been triggered by his interviews with Viola and Morehouse, it might just as easily have been caused by his meeting with me, or the visit we made to Sheriff Dennis’s office. And none of those contacts would ever have occurred had my father come clean about Viola’s death from the beginning.

Holding my compulsion in check, I walk down to my basement office and take a manila folder from the bookshelf. It contains dozens of snapshots and mementoes I used to make a short video for Dad’s seventy-second birthday. Shuffling through the photos, I find the image I’m looking for: Christmas Eve at Dr. Wendell Lucas’s office, December 1963. John F. Kennedy has been dead just about a month. Dad and Mom have just moved Jenny and me to Natchez, in the midst of a harrowing blizzard.

Why have I come for this photograph? What can it tell me?

Dr. Lucas’s waiting room has been decorated with red poinsettias, and four bottles of champagne stand open on a coffee table. The clerical staff are big-bosomed country girls with bouffant hairdos. Dr. Lucas and my father stand center stage, their white coats open to reveal the suits and ties they wore to work every day. To their right stand two elderly white nurses I remember vaguely, and beside them the dark-skinned Esther Ford, whose kind eyes remain indelibly alive in my memory. Behind these three women—taller, younger, and so strikingly beautiful that, once your eye falls upon her, she dominates the entire photograph—stands Viola Turner.

Most of the women are grinning and toasting the camera, and even Esther’s smile is wider than usual. Viola’s expression is more remote, her wide brown eyes alert as those of a doe in an open field, her perfect teeth not showing at all. Her beauty is simultaneously earthy and ethereal. It’s also a special pass, of sorts. Viola stands easily among these mostly white people, as Esther does, but she is not of them. She’s an interloper, a silent scout for an army that would soon be fighting a bloody war for equality. Less than a year after this picture was taken, the first skirmishes would break out on both sides of the river, and Albert Norris would die. Pooky Wilson, too.