ready for the photographers who had gathered to snap pictures of the inspirational middle-class colored family. But Mr. Jordan couldn’t be found. By the time he was located, sharing an intimate moment with one of the hospital cleaning ladies in a supply closet, the photographers had taken their snapshots and gone. That cleaning lady may or may not have been the woman who gave him the syphilis he passed on to his wife, sterilizing her and ensuring that Clarice would be an only child; Abraham was never quite certain. And so it went, from the time Clarice was old enough to understand what
