Grayson drove Higginbottom and his family to the courthouse first, which looks much as it did in 1935, and which Washington’s 7-year-old son, Rico, declared “just like the White House.” But the surrounding square, once full of car dealerships and theaters, has given way to boutiques, restaurants and fitness studios — the markers of a prosperous New South. Because it was Saturday, the courthouse doors were locked. Washington stood outside and posed for a photo, her arms flung wide and her face lit by a broad smile. It was a tourist’s gesture of pleasure, an outward expression of the enlightenment she felt. She also wanted photos to show her students. She had already shocked them by telling them about her granddaddy’s lynching. Some didn’t know what she was talking about. “They asked me, ‘What is “lynched”?’ ” Washington said, shaking her head. “African-Americans. I have African-American and Hispanic kids in my class.”

From the courthouse, Grayson then traced the route of Higginbotham’s kidnappers to the Three-Way, an intersection that’s now a four-way — flanked by gas stations and an auto mechanic, a forgettable gateway to and from town. David Higginbottom originally planned to come to Oxford, too, to join his family in that van as they considered his grandfather’s last moments, but he changed his mind; it was too hard to think about how someone could hang and shoot another human being. “I didn’t want to open nothing in my heart that I can’t close,” he said. “I want to think people are the same. I just wasn’t ready for it.”

Grayson swung the van onto a short street that was formerly known, she believed, as old Russell Road. She parked beside a little white house with a For Sale sign planted in the front yard. The family climbed out of the van, and Higginbottom almost immediately gestured to an oak. “I wonder if that’s the tree, right there?” he said. They didn’t know, of course, but from then on the suggestion seemed to linger in the air around it. Higginbottom’s nephew Tyrone looked at its branches and searched the trunk for bullet holes. Higginbottom thought of his father’s final moments, of his agony. Elwood Higginbotham reportedly struggled mightily at the end, biting a length of the noose so tightly that his killers pried his mouth open with a tire iron in order to hang him. “He was trying to protect us,” Higginbottom said. “I know that.”

Washington hustled her kids back into the van after just a few minutes. They sat in the sweltering interior while their relatives traced aimless circles on the grass. Washington’s feelings about the trip to Oxford were hard to express, even months afterward. She wasn’t exactly sad. How could she be? She didn’t know her grandfather. Yet standing in front of the courthouse and at the approximate spot where he died gave her a sense of closeness; those were places, she said, “where we know he was at.” In January, a kitchen fire would scorch the rented house Washington shared with her husband, children and father, and she would find herself thinking and talking more about Elwood Higginbotham. “Now I feel like he may have been more interesting to have known,” she said. “I feel like he may have been a stronger person than we know. I think if he had been alive, there might have been more stability in the family, our lives might have been different.”

They left the oak as the afternoon light began to soften. Burke had narrowed Higginbotham’s burial site to two possibilities. At the first, she parked alongside a rural highway, perpendicular to a pasture and wooden fence. The cemetery lay on private property that was for sale; a real estate agent had told Grayson that the site contained only seven graves with marked headstones, none of which read Higginbotham. Because they couldn’t enter the property, no one bothered to get out of the van, and they paused for only a few minutes before Grayson set a course southward, skirting suburban-style subdivisions before plunging into rural territory again. Higginbottom sat beside her, and they chatted about muscadines, the South’s bittersweet wild grapes.

The second cemetery was also on private land, upslope behind a house fronted by roses and a shiny pickup truck. The owner, Randy McCluskey, wanted to help, and he greeted the Higginbottoms in his driveway. He had prematurely gray hair and wore shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Rebels,” the name of the University of Mississippi athletic teams. He guided Higginbottom into a camouflage A.T.V. so that the older man wouldn’t have to limp uphill. Rico, Bailee and Trinity, eager for a diversion, clamored into the cargo bed behind them. “Hold on,” Washington shouted as the little vehicle puttered off. “Hold on.”

She and the rest of the family picked their way up the grassy field to reach the border of woods thick with cedars and oaks. In the shade of the trees, the air felt like a wet blanket, and mosquitoes homed in on open flesh. When McCluskey bought the 35-acre property six years ago, the graveyard was largely hidden by vegetation and crawling with ticks. He cleared brush to reveal markers, some bearing names and others mere stones, and tried to learn about the plot’s history. One neighbor told him that blacks and whites lay here together, so maybe this was the right place.

The family fanned out among the trees. They were overdressed — Higginbottom in his suspenders and Wright in red gladiator sandals — and uncomfortable. Higginbottom talked about how young his mother was, just 22, when she was forced to remake their lives. Rico drifted into the field below and found McCluskey’s son and a friend. The boys horsed around with a sapling, pulling on its branches and laughing in the sunlight. The adults stared at the ground but found no proof that their relative was interred there. In the dark woods, amid the crumbling gravestones, Elwood Higginbotham’s life and death remained, to a great degree, beyond the limits of understanding.