“I am not a fool! I am also not the sort of woman your mother seems to have made me out to be. And your father, too, I suppose. The sort of woman who would have said that the only thing worse than marrying your father would have been to wed a Negro.”

She sat still for a moment, hands flat on the table, then said, “I have a secret to tell, boys, come closer, for I must whisper it.” One hand motioned to them, the other raised a finger to her lips. They leaned toward her, and she said in an undertone, “I believe that Negroes are human beings, no different than you or me. I always have. Hush, now. Don’t ever repeat that to anyone around here. Things in some ways are worse now than they used to be. Did you hear what happened in Georgia only last year? Some crackers got hold of a Negro boy they believed had had relations with a white woman and they hanged him and then dismembered him and burned his body and then put the parts they cut off on display in a department store window. So hush, but come with me.” Unhooking her cane from the arm of her chair, she slowly stood. “Come, I wish to correct your unfavorable impression of me.”

They followed her, she hobbling on her arthritic ankles, her body trailing the scents of cologne and medicine, into a small room with no identifiable purpose except to house ancestral photographs and portraits. The largest were oil paintings of her two husbands: Astride a white horse, Caleb Maxey, the Southern cavalier, looked across to the opposite wall at Lucien Wilcox, the soberly garbed banker sitting at a desk. On the back wall, between two windows, hung a photograph of Pardon Lightbourne, identical, the boys observed, to the one in their mother’s sitting room in Boston, except this print had been tinted by an artist to show the color of their grandfather’s hair and eyes, the yellow epaulets and piping on his gray tunic and trousers, the silver in his sword scabbard, gleaming as if it had been forged from sunlight.

“He did cut quite the figure, did he not?” said Aunt Judith, noticing them admiring the picture. “That was posed just before he went off to fight with Longstreet at Seven Pines.”