Liz was quite a woman. Whenever I was home and Jeanne was not around, Liz and I would communicate as best we could. Growing up in Czechoslovakia, I had never met a Black person; there were essentially none in the country. But in high school in Prague, an American film came to the movie theaters — I believe it was called Syncopations, or something close to that. It was an old movie about the origins of jazz in New Orleans, interlaced with scenes from the Civil War era and following the music as it moved to Chicago. It portrayed Black musicians and white musicians together, and it had wonderful New Orleans jazz throughout. I saw it many times and for a period I wanted nothing more than to become a trumpet player like Louis Armstrong. That film started a jazz revival across Eastern Europe; dixieland orchestras were forming everywhere, and we learned from our mothers how to dance the charleston. So by the time I arrived in America, I was already very interested in Black history and culture, and I had a lot of conversations with Liz because of it.

She had come from the South. She told me her husband, or ex-husband, was in Alcatraz for killing someone. She had daughters and grandchildren living in Roxbury. On Sundays she would dress up nicely and her daughter would come to pick her up to go to the Baptist church in Roxbury; many times I drove her there myself and dropped her off at the church.

At some point she went and got her first driver’s license, because I had gotten mine. And she enrolled in a local high school at night, working toward her diploma, because I was going to night school. I have always remembered that — that she decided to do those things because she saw me doing them. After we moved from Babcock Street to Sherborn in 1969, I lost track of her, since life was too hectic for me at that point. I have always regretted that.