The two years he’d spent in and out of Albert’s store were the most vivid of Henry’s life. Nothing that happened to him afterward ever touched the live-wire euphoria he’d felt within the vibrating walls of that building, or the longing he’d suffered when he was trapped somewhere else, thinking about getting back to it.

Most of the musicians who came through Albert’s store were fast-aging boys who would still be boys when they found their graves. Albert himself was a wise man of fifty who’d never let the world beat his dreams out of him. His eyes were deep brown pools set in a darker brown face, and his hands, unlike those of the other black men Henry knew, weren’t cracked and broken from backbreaking labor, but soft and long-fingered, like the hands of a surgeon or a classical violinist.

Albert was so well liked in the community that during the nineteen years since the Japanese surrender, a practice unheard-of almost anywhere else in the South had become the norm there. Albert not only served white customers, but white women—white women were known to browse his store’s extensive library of sheet music—white women alone, with Albert the only other person present. Henry’s mother had told him this was highly unusual, but she herself bought hymn music in Albert’s store. Moreover, in those days, every family that could afford one had a piano in the parlor, and Albert had traveled the parish tuning the instruments for five dollars less than the white tuner charged. Apparently, the white husbands’ racism didn’t extend to paying extra to have a white man tune their pianos.

Henry’s secret odyssey through Albert’s store had begun with piano lessons, first with the proprietor, but later with Albert’s daughter Swan, who’d been named after a black opera singer from Natchez. Born a slave in 1824, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield had traveled to London and sung for the queen in Buckingham Palace, where opera enthusiasts christened her the Black Swan. Albert Norris had known all about the Black Swan, of course. Swan’s mother had tried to call her Elizabeth, but the child had such beauty and grace that no one ever called her anything but Swan. Like her father, Swan was a musical prodigy, and by seventeen she was handling the majority of Albert’s lessons.