Ephraim had found Rowan Lavery’s high school history teacher, and his poor pastor at St. Alban’s Lutheran. He’d found a former editorial assistant at Eli’s publisher who recalled the arrival of the manuscript of Against Youth, and the discussions around it, and also the UVA professor who had sent it. He’d even tracked down the author of an old Facebook post proclaiming Stone a fraud and found a very irascible person in Deerfield, Virginia. Deerfield, Virginia, being not so highly populated—143 people had been living there in 1999—it was far from likely that a definitely not local young man living alone in a cabin off Guy Hollow Road would be either unnoticed or forgotten. And so he was not. The irascible person owned the only grocery store within twelve miles, and that year he had watched this definitely not local young man change color and change—as far as he was concerned—race. Being an informed libertarian, this man had read Against Youth when it was published that year, and in fact had recommended it to many friends, but the book had no photograph of the author, so he didn’t connect the name Eli Absalom Stone with the changing face of the definitely not local young man; that would have to wait for the rise of Fox News, and even then the libertarian—being a libertarian—believed it was none of his business. He said what he had to say on the Coalition of Libertarian Thinkers Facebook page and he went along his way, and that was it for the only known witness to the physiological transformation of the person formerly known as Rowan Lavery. Until Ephraim Western turned up in his email in-box.
Ephraim had also found every publicly available bit of information about the Hayek Institute of Monticello, Virginia, whose membership had long included the wunderkind Eli Absalom Stone along with his mentor, Professor Oren Gregories, and Roger Fount, who was one of those people the president liked to phone late at night. Among the other members, it took him no time at all to discover, was his own half brother, Harrison Oppenheimer.
On CNN and MSNBC, and in the remaining vessels of high-standard print journalism, people wanted to talk about why, but on Twitter and Facebook all anybody seemed to care about was how. The world had watched Michael Jackson’s skin tone lighten for years, but moving in the other direction seemed to defy understanding. Ephraim had no definitive answer of his own, but it hardly mattered; the topic was quickly handed off to dermatologists and pharmacologists who hashed it out on everyone’s behalf, and consensus began to center around Ammi majus, or bishop’s weed, a psoralen-containing annual plant （possibly in conjunction with ultraviolet light）。 Don Lemon fielded a panel of experts in facial comparison, and sat them before a split screen of Rowan Lavery’s high school graduation photo and a photo of Eli Absalom Stone at CPAC. Nobody dissented. And Alice Lavery, Rowan’s sister, came tearing out of West Virginia, screaming bloody murder on CNN. “I know who you are!” she said, pointing menacingly into the camera. “I see you.” She wanted a DNA test and she wanted her brother to come back to St. Albans, not just because she intended to beat him to a pulp, but because their father didn’t have much time left. （Seeing his only son in permanent blackface would not be conducive to his health, either.）
Fox, which for years had delighted in Eli’s quiet and incisive analysis, dealt with the revelations by reasserting the cultural significance of Against Youth and bemoaning the ways in which the Black community targeted its own role models.
“You have to hand it to this guy,” said Rachel Maddow to Ephraim Western on the eighth day of his media phalanx. （Ephraim was notably more relaxed on camera than he’d been when the story broke. He wore a Yale Daily News T-shirt and looked as if he’d just rolled out of bed.） “I mean, the commitment! To make a decision like that, that you’ll have to live with, your whole life.”
“I don’t disagree,” Ephraim told her. “I’m only a couple of years older than he was then, and I can’t see staking my whole life on a single decision right now. He must have felt it was worth it.”
“At least until last week,” Rachel Maddow said.
“And,” said Ephraim, “we should also recognize, with race and self-identification, the picture gets less and less precise all the time. Thirty-five percent of African American men today have a white ancestor, and thirty percent of white Americans have a Black ancestor. I absolutely believe there’s a role for self-identification, but do we want to walk around with a menu of our genetic components? I myself have a white father and a Black mother, but my Black mother’s DNA is eight percent white, so does that make me fifty-four percent white and forty-five percent Black? I mean, life’s too short! I’m Ephraim. I identify as Black. Okay?”