A man with a camera is like a naturalist, I told Elsebeth. Where one man might catch butterflies, another catches wasps.

I did not make these pictures.

I only caught them.

The man with the rifle stood five or six yards away at the corner of the barracks. He was a black man in threadbare coveralls. He was sweating in the heat. For a while there was silence, the three of us blinking at each other.

Then, “I didn’t mean to shoot him,” the black man said.

“Then you shouldn’t have aimed a rifle at him and pulled the trigger,” I said back, recklessly.

Our assailant made no immediate response. He seemed to be thinking this over. Grasshoppers lit on the cuffs of his ragged pants. His head was large, his hair cut crudely close to the skull. His eyes were narrow and suspicious. He was barefoot.

“It was not my intention to hurt anyone,” he said again. “I was shooting from a distance, sir.”

By this time Percy had managed to sit up. He seemed less afraid of the rifleman than he ought to have been. Less afraid, at any rate, than I was. “What did you intend?”

He gave his attention to Percy. “To warn you away, is all.”

“Away from what?”

“This building.”

“Why? What’s in this building?”

“My son.”

The “three million” in Percy’s title were the men, women and children of African descent held in bondage in the South in the year 1860. For obvious reasons, the number is approximate. Percy always tried to be conservative in his estimates, for he did not want to be vulnerable to accusations of sensationalizing history.

Given that number to begin with, what Percy had done was to tally up census polls, where they existed, alongside the archived reports of various state and local governments, tax and business statements, Federal surveys, rail records, etc., over the years between then and now.

What befell the three million?

A great many—as many as one third—emigrated North, before changes in the law made that difficult. Some of those who migrated continued on up to Canada. Others made lives for themselves in the big cities, insofar as they were allowed to. A smaller number were taken up against their will and shipped to certain inhospitable “colonies” in Africa, until the excesses and horrors of repatriation became notorious and the whole enterprise was outlawed.