1 He is fifteen in my account. In two years this boy—James Travis, Jr.—will be wounded at Fort Sumter, fighting with Major Robert Anderson; his nurse will be a black girl, Zelphy Thomas, and James, finding her with child on August 3, 1861, will choose love over bigotry, moving his new family to southern Illinois, where his great-granddaughter, Ellen, an early NAACP activist, will integrate a lunch counter on April 23, 1935. She will die five years later, on the Northeast Side of Carbondale, surrounded by admirers, white and black.