My father Chas Bouguereau upped sticks some sixty years ago and left Louisiana and settled himself in Paris, a small town in Tennessee. It was 1840. A wiser man would have pushed on to the Ohio. A free skin was an awkward suit in West Tennessee. His own father was a man called Germain Bouguereau that spoke French and owned a big sugarcane farm ten miles out from New Orleans, and his mother was a woman from Madagascar but her name has long fallen away. I remember my mother talking about her though, when we were little, not that she could have known a thing about her. It was all just pretty legend. If Germain asked a by-your-leave of my grandmother then I’m a Frenchman too.

He had a sort of is-he-isn’t-he look to him, my father. But he was charming as all get-out, and lots of folk loved him. My mother said old man Bouguereau had let him go. But who knows? Maybe that was just part of his story, when he sneaked up to Tennessee. Germain Bouguereau never sent a hunter or set a notice so maybe it was so.

He had a long shining face, my mother said. And he was fortunate in his trade as a blacksmith, fixing ploughs and wheels and shoeing horses, that he had learned as a trusted Creole man.

He had found himself able to earn decent money in Louisiana – and, having made his dangerous move, in Tennessee.

The reason he felt bound to make that journey he never made clear. Stupid folk that didn’t know said he was too handsome for Louisiana and too clever. He wasn’t long suiting himself out to be a king on Sundays, and he had an open laughing manner which was why people took to him and the patrollers let him be for the most part. No man was free to a patroller. And West Tennessee was not big on the notion of free in general. There was no going into the town of Paris just as he liked. He’d be whipped and worse if he tried that, just like today. He had to have a bona fide docket from someone, saying he needed iron or whatever. He made nails and horseshoes with his furnace and his blacksmith’s anvil. He brought that anvil all the way up the country, pulling a little wheeled cart behind him – no Mississippi river for him. That took four weeks. He settled in a shack at the edge of the Littlefair place, because of his obvious usefulness to them. He brought the bounty of his skill everywhere.

By his own account, he happened on my mother one day. Love loves an accidental sighting, and that was how it was with him. He knew no better than to fall for her. I believe in her extreme youth she was the best-looking girl in Paris. Small, shaped nicely, and with a sweet, trusting nature. She told me this, and I can believe it. My father set eyes on her and the die was cast. Alea iacta est , as Caesar said. She was walking between the fields and the house, with a red kerchief at her waist full of biscuit. It wasn’t his fault that he put down his sack of tools and politely enquired who she was. She told him. Well. But what could he do? He was smitten. She was a house-girl on the Littlefair place, which was a big enterprise of tobacco, and also honeybees, and acres and acres of wheat, and often had urgent cause to call a blacksmith. That’s why he had situated himself there, we may suppose. He was a free person but he knew what it was to be her. Louisiana had slaves too, plenty. And every day that summer he made it his business to walk her way, and in the great enthusiasm of love he won her heart. Not that she had two free minutes in a day to have it won, but he managed to cram in the courtship. And although he was in a poor position to seek her hand, he was that sort of man – he went down to see Colonel Littlefair. And he went in as bold as anyone ever did that task. The big old house with its wide wooden floors, and the clattering sound that his hobnail boots made, didn’t daunt him. There were old leather books everywhere that the colonel’s father must have bought to give it a bit of a face. Sticks of gleaming furniture. Chandeliers with their trapped bits of sunlight.

He had taken care to don his best shoes and trimmest trousers.

And he went in to Littlefair, who was stretched nearly flat in a big leather chair, because of his stiff high boots, and his round stomach, and asked for my mother, who was only eighteen years old and had great value.