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Around Viola’s felled tree, lamplights of historical knowledge flicker like electrified fireflies.

The men gazed back like mongooses caught in lamplights.

As Lincoln spoke, one observer, Mrs. Lincoln’s dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, a free black woman, standing a few steps from the president, remarked that the lamplight made him “stand out boldly in the darkness.”

His memories, he says, “are still tinged with the lamplight of that era” before electricity.

Two hours and a rapid PCR test later, I sat in the dark of a tent, watching as two young women formed a kind of Pietà in a pool of warm yellow lamplight.