She had two adult sons living with her, one of whom I had met in the stables, and she felt safe enough, she told me, even with her husband absent. “But we’re a long way from anywhere,” she added, “and the traffic along this road has been light ever since—well, ever since the Lodge closed down. I wasn’t kidding about those sand hills, Mister. Be careful up there.”

“We mean to be back by nightfall,” I said.

* * *

My daughter Elsebeth had met Percy Camber just once, when he came to the house in Detroit to discuss his plans with me. Elsie had been meticulously polite to him. Percy had offered her his hand, and she, wide-eyed, had taken it. “You’re very neatly dressed,” she had said.

She was not used to well-dressed black men. The only blacks Elsebeth had seen were the day laborers who gathered on the wharves. Detroit housed a small community of Negroes who had come north with the decline of slavery, before Congress passed the Labor Protection Act. They did “the jobs white men won’t do,” for wages to which white men would not submit.

“You’re very prettily dressed yourself,” Percy Camber said, ignoring the unintended insult.

Maggie, my wife, had simply refused to see him.

“I’m not some radical old Congregationalist,” she told me, “eager to socialize with every tawny Moor who comes down the pike. That’s your side of the family, Tom, not mine.”

True enough. Maggie’s people were Episcopalians who had prospered in Michigan since before it was a state—sturdy, reliable folks. They ran a string of warehouses that catered to the lake trade. My father was a disappointed Whig who had spent a single term in the Massachusetts legislature pursuing the chimera of Free Education before he died at an early age, and my mother’s bookshelves still groaned under the weight of faded tomes on the subjects of Enlightened Marriage and Women’s Suffrage. I came from a genteel family of radical tendencies and modest means. I was never sure Maggie’s people understood that poverty and gentility could truly coexist.