The remains of Pilgassi Acres became visible as we rounded a final bend, and I was frankly astonished that so much of it remained intact. Percy Camber drew in his breath.

Here were the administrators’ quarters (a small building with pretensions to the colonial style), as well as five huge barnlike buildings and fragments of paving stones and mortared brick where more substantial structures had been demolished.

All silent, all empty. No glass in the small windows. A breeze like the breath from a hard-coal stove seeped around the buildings and tousled the meadow weeds that lapped at them. There was the smell of old wood that had stood in the sunlight for a long time. There was, beneath that, the smell of something less pleasant, like an abandoned latrine doused with lime and left to simmer in the heat.

Percy was working to conceal his excitement. He pretended to be casual, but I could see that every muscle in him had gone tense.

“Your camera, Tom,” he said, as if the scene were in some danger of evaporating before our eyes.

“You don’t want to explore the place a little first?”

“Not yet. I want to capture it as we see it now—from a distance, all the buildings all together.”

And I did that. The sun, though masked by light high clouds, was a feverish nuisance over my right shoulder.

I thought of my daughter Elsebeth. She would see these pictures some day. “What place is this?” she would ask.

But what would I say in return?

Any answer I could think of amounted to drilling a hole in her innocence and pouring poison in.

Every Measure Short of War, the title of Percy’s first book, implied that there might have been one—a war over Abolition, that is, a war between the states. My mother agreed. “Though it was not the North that would have brought it on,” she insisted. (A conversation we had had on the eve of my marriage to Maggie.) “People forget how sullen the South was in the years before the Douglas Compromise. How fierce in the defense of slavery. Their ‘Peculiar Institution’! Strange, isn’t it, how people cling most desperately to a thing when it becomes least useful to them?”