Chapter 4 Summary

From the mid1870s through most of the 1880s, Anderson Frazier researches the "peculiarities" of the American people. Frustrated with rugged life in his native Canada, Frazier ranges up and down the Atlantic coast, but writes his popular pamphlets from Boston. He lives with Esther Sokoloff, a New Yorker who, without explanation, refuses to marry him. He is touring the South for a successful pamphlet series, Curiosities and Oddities about Our Southern Neighbors, which includes one on slave-holding free blacks before the war.

In August 1881, Frazier approaches Fern, whom he takes for a white woman, sitting on her porch, and she agrees to speak with him. Remembering siblings he has not seen in nine years, Frazier says blacks owning blacks is the oddest oddity he has come upon; it is like owning your own family. Hiding behind her wide-brimmed hat, Fern objects weakly...