Sublime

‘Lyds,’ my mum said when I was leaving. She looked out of place in her new room, which was decorated with someone in their eighties or nineties in mind. Mum has for the last couple of centuries looked like she is in her early forties. She still has black hair, just with some streaks of grey here and there. Her eyes are still bright.

All children want to be ordinary, and she never was, and that had been difficult – but all adults want to be extraordinary, and now she amplifies her strangeness, delighting in her ignorance of worldly matters and her tendency to speak sometimes in a biblical cadence, telling men she meets that she was born in 1887 (this being the year they dug Bet

When he was thirty-two years old, Thomy Lafon was listed in the 1842 city directory as a merchant. His mother was born a free woman in Haiti and had arrived with other migrants post-revolution. Lafon grew wealthy through real estate. The Holy Family nursing home was the result of one of many of his charitable donations made in service of Black peop

“Lu, don’t you have any friends your own age to hang out with?” That was cruel. AJ knew I didn’t. Although I did have a plan to take care of that, a strategy for transformation that would make me the most popular girl in the third grade.

Agassiz’s son, Alexander, who was trained by his father and served as his principal museum assistant, became a leading zoologist, a pioneer in oceanography, and made a fortune in copper mining, much of which he ultimately devoted to the museum and other work begun by his father. Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, in less than a decade after her husband’s deat

didn’t know Lee Adams or his family, but as far as we were concerned, after Johnny Appleseed (who had lived briefly in our town), he was the most famous person to have emerged from Mansfield.