Charlotte remembered seeing her mother whipped by a white man who had the face of a boy—wasn’t even grown enough to have a full beard, she remembered. Her mother locked eyes with Charlotte and told her, clear as if she’d spoken the words aloud, to stay where she was. Don’t move toward me, my child. This will pass. Charlotte stayed where she was, but she lost the use of her ears for the first time. The whip hitting her mother’s back and cutting through became a mute. Her mother’s lips continued to move, but Charlotte heard something akin to silence. Charlotte floated above herself and her mother, but she didn’t know at such a young age that she should float away, head northward, into the gathering clouds. After the whip left, her mother hugged her but told Charlotte to keep her arms to her sides. Don’t touch my back, my child. This too shall pass.

Mattie, was this Charlotte’s mother or was it yours, Pat wanted to know.

“Charlotte’s,” I replied, “but to the whip, she was no one’s mother, Pat.”

Charlotte learned her first lesson of lesser when she was five. Pat learned his lesson at two tens and five.

Yes, the dismissal from the Enquirer was a surprise to Pat. It wasn’t to me, but you didn’t ask that, Miss.

Pat slept all of the following day. I brought him his meals, though he claimed no hunger pangs. The next day he did the same and the next. On the fourth day, I went to the whiskey-shop myself to pay off his tab and to collect his belongings. I didn’t want Pat’s pens and pipes ending up in a pawnshop.

I knew where to go, Miss, because Pat was, in many ways, a very good storyteller. Pat’s stories were as good as maps. The ones about his first days in Cincinnati were often set in a whiskey-shop at the border of the Levee and Sausage Row.

I knew to look for some trees in the front that Pat had described as looking half-starved, a sagging porch—but that could have been any of the buildings there—and a barkeep who kept a crow by his side that sounded like a colored man laughing.

The amount that the barkeep and the crow wanted sounded higher to me than the tab for one man, even if Pat had made a full day’s effort at drinking. The barkeep called him “Mr. Lafcadio” and claimed that Mr. Lafcadio had also bought rounds for others that day.

Yes, he was a Negro barkeep, Miss. His crow was colored too, if you want to write that down.

The barkeep asked, “Are you Pat’s new woman?”

“I’m his wife,” I replied.

The crow at the barkeep’s side laughed, and he hushed it by lightly touching the top of its sleek head.