For a fictional work spanning nearly two centuries, we consulted numerous sources. To set the timbre of various decades, we relied heavily on contemporaneous newspapers, journals, and letters. We also gleaned much from studying photographs and images, and from listening to the music when recordings were available. While the core of our story is based on the lore of family and friends, colorful and mysterious oral histories, our efforts got context and grounding from many excellent scholarly sources. A few tomes stand out in their invaluable specificity: James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935; Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South; Dorothy Sterling, editor, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century; Bernard E. Powers, Jr., Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822–1885; Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe; David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880–1930; Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song; Rosalyn M. Story, And So I Sing: African-American Divas of Opera and Concert; Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light; Gregory A. Freeman, Lay This Body Down: The 1921 Murders of Eleven Plantation Slaves; Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York; and W. E. B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 and David Levering Lewis’s When Harlem Was in Vogue, which remain the definitive texts on these two vital eras.