Back then your kin could lean down on you with the weight of the world and still not quite say, "Get yourself up here to see Mary Greet; she's dying fast, and it's your plain duty." So in mid-February of 1960, on the floor of my own despair, I got a postcard from my cousin Anna Palmer. It said "Aunt Mary is sinking fast and speaks of you." I changed my plans for the next Sunday and made the two-hour drive to see her through clear warm weather that lifted a corner at least of my spirits.

When I'd seen her last in August '58, Mary claimed to be "somewhere way past my eighties." And though she'd picked 60 pounds of cotton the day before—a great deal of cotton—the pictures of her I took on that visit show a balding head, eyes opalescent with the film of age, and the fixed stance of an ancient sybil, senior to God. So if she was, say, more than 90 in the pictures, then she might very well have been born a slave. Even in those years of frank segregation, I'd never been able to ask her the truth. My older kin never mentioned slavery, as if it were some much-cherished dead loved one, too painful to summon. And I'd hesitated with Mary Greet from a vague, maybe misplaced courtesy—you seldom ask men if they've been in prison. The time had come though. I had a need now, to understand pain, that licensed the probe. I'd ask her today.

When I pulled up by her match-box house, she was out in the yard in a straight-backed chair, apparently searching an old hound for ticks. I knew she couldn't see me till I got much closer; so I stood by the car and raised my voice, "Aunt Mary, dogs don't have ticks in the winter."