Hugh Crane celebrated his fourteenth birthday in 1938 by climbing into the bed of the family's black maid, Sophie Hage. She had observed his precocity and wasn't surprised at the timing; and the deed itself, she had learned, was par for the sons and the female servants of the best families on Park Avenue. What was not normal was the passion that endured over several months, and the extent to which she herself was picked up and carried by it. Soon they were sharing secrets, just as if they were true lovers and equals, not master and servant.
"Nails and glass in your shoes?" she asked him on the day that Nazi tanks crossed the border into Czechoslovakia.
"I read about it in a book about saints that I got from the library on Forty-second Street," he said.
"But that's crazy, mon." She was from Haiti.
"But it worked," he said. "I saw Jesus."
"You saw Jesus?"
"Well," he said bashfully. "That wasn't just from the nails in my shoes. It was after I whipped my back with wet rope for six hours."
Sophie gazed at him thoughtfully for a long time. "What you trying to do, boy?"
"I'm learning how to live without fear," he said simply. "You know my dad. He's afraid of everything and everybody. Jews, Catholics, bad omens, the government, a broken mirror… you know. I just don't want to live my life that way."
Sophie thought about it for three days. Then she told him there was a man he ought to meet.
"What sort of man?" he asked.
"A high priest of Voudon."