Four episodes in re-creating a life

This four-part reflection concerns a white, working-class woman in New England who married a West Indian man of color in 1869. The first part tells the story of the death of the woman's first husband in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War; the second part recounts what little the archives reveal of the years between the end of the war and the woman's remarriage, to the West Indian man, four years later. The third part spins two possible scenarios for the initial meeting between the white widow and the man of color; the last recounts the author's visit to a house in Vermont where the woman lived in the 1860s, prompting an imaginative leap to fill in the archival gap.