Complementing his father’s anvil-and-plumb-line orientation was his mother’s organic sympathy with nature. A gifted herbalist, healer, and midwife, Rapture Meadhorn was well up on biology, generally-specifically zoology, entomology, botany, and pharmacology. It was said that she knew things the Wyandot Indians had forgotten. And she was inventive in her own way, too. She had pioneered a form of acupuncture and a remedial massage technique that had worked on subjects as different as a Clydesdale mare and a Columbus socialite-not to mention cultivating some esoteric personal abilities, including, possibly, continuous orgasms and short-distance telepathy. (It was also believed that she could talk to ghosts-like Benjamin Dumm’s sister, who had drowned in a tank at the tan yard.)

Rapture was the proud and voluptuous daughter of a Creole cane farmer from the Sea Islands, who had been born into slavery but had proved himself too shrewd for his plantation masters and so was freed. He left the islands and headed west, joining forces with a trapper who traded pelts in Kentucky. The trapper had a daughter who had been raised to be a “granny woman,” a cross between a root doctor and a witch. The girl was as pretty as a wildflower and as randy as a river pirate, and the freedman ended up eloping with her, fleeing north to Ohio to escape the father’s Hawken rifle.

Rapture’s parents had both died in a cabin fire when she was fourteen, but she survived and grew up clever and curved. Although she referred to herself as a “pumpkinskin” around the family, she was in fact blessed with a creamy complexion that had but a hint of nutmeg to suggest her colorful ancestry. Her speech she could pinch into everyday white diction, but with family and friends she would lapse into the rich rhythms and eccentric phrasings of the Gullah language she had picked up from her Cumberland Island father. (If you were to speak to her, she might in private say that you had “cracked e teet.”)