Dear Olive,

You probably won’t remember me for very long, but I’ll always remember you. It’s not very often that I can instantly recall any one of the people on the thousands of tours I’ve led, much less the face and voice of a 6 year-old little girl.

I’ll admit that when I first saw you run up the steps of the gift shop, I winced somewhat, thinking you might make the experience difficult for me and the other guests. Oh, how wrong I was. You were tightly clutching the stuffed tiger you got for Christmas, the one Santa brought you because you helped save a wild tiger online.

You stood right beside me in the basement and helped me usher the other visitors into the room, your little hands and bright smile gathering them in. Your parents kept telling you not to ask too many questions, to stay by them, but you eventually made your way back to “help me.” I asked you if your tiger had a name, if it was a boy or a girl.

“A boy,” you told me. “And he doesn’t have a name yet.”
“Well, we’re going to hear plenty of names today. Maybe you can find a name for him here.”

You walked ahead of me onto the back gallery. Beyond you, I could see the old water well and I dared not look at you or your parents when the words got trapped in my chest that Laura was about your age, another little girl in a time and place so far removed and so nightmarishly close, when she encountered Pa Philippe out there.

As we continued, you walked right beside me, looking at the ground. You asked me what was on the old man’s face. I hesitated and finally found the words to tell you they were scars because he had been burned, because he tried to run away.

“Because he was a slave?”
“Yes.”
You simply replied, “There aren’t any slaves anymore.”
“No. There aren’t any slaves anymore.”

How could I not look at you and realise that once-upon-a-time your name might have been on that handwritten list from not so long ago, the mercantile inventory of human beings… men, women, little boys… and little girls just like you.

Carefree of the weight of my words, you skipped out of the barn toward the cabins holding your tiger, ironically juxtaposed to the other little brown girls with white fathers who skipped along that path decades and centuries before you, the ones whose names and faces and voices are lost to time.

But not yours.
Not yet.
Not ever.

You listened intently to the last story, your tiger on your lap. At the end, you simply stated, “His name is Edward. I’m going to name my tiger Edward.”

Dear Olive,

You probably won’t remember me for very long. But I will always, always remember you.