You knew a meeting was getting work done when Miss Dinah began her sharp, piercing giggle. It was uncontrollable, a little hysterical, and did not necessarily prompt the other women to join in. It was more like the whistle of a teakettle; it told you pressure was high, waters were rolling to a boil, that something was happening, and that whatever it was, it was as wondrous and yet as deceptively common as water transforming into air.

I have never in my life felt anything as powerful as whatever force was in that room while those women talked, and I began to believe that it was the talking itself that did it, that perhaps women’s voices in harmony were like some sort of flintstone sparking, or like the hot burst of air that comes through a window, billowing the curtains, before rain. Sometimes, I imagined the whole room lifting up from their talk—lifting up and spinning out, out, into the future times to come, when everyone would be truly free. The time I thought we were all planning for.

To bring them back down, when a workday was done, they would turn to some sort of amusement. It had to be something calming, something sober. “We need to rest a little in order to keep going,” was what Miss Annie always said.

They decided on trading compliments. They’d write them down on slips of paper, unsigned but addressed to the lady they wished to compliment, and then put them in an old flour tin Mama had. At the end of the meeting, they’d draw the slips out one at a time and read the ode, and then the fun began in guessing the author.

Everyone saved their praise by pasting the compliments into little books they stitched together and then passing them around to be signed by every lady present—a record of attendance. They made bindings out of the rags they had around, stuffed into the bottom of their sewing baskets. ‘Friendship albums,’ they called them. Everyone’s album started neat and clean and pretty, of course, but it was every woman’s goal to have a ruined one, a book with worn pages and extra leaves stuffed in, one bursting at the seams, because that showed how loved you were.

Mama was jealous of the other women. Sometimes, at the end of a meeting, I caught her fingering the pages of her own album, looking from hers to theirs. Hers were always a bit neater, a bit cleaner, and much thinner. Even after all she’d done for the orphans, even as the group conspired about how to make her a hospital, even after all that work, Mama would lift the other women’s heavier books and sign them, smiling, while only a few of them signed hers. Ben Daisy still stood dripping over her, a rebuke.

I suppose I should have been angry at the other women on behalf of Mama. If I was a loyal daughter, I would have felt that. But at the end of every meeting, I looked at Mama’s thin book and only felt sorry for her, not mad at them. Is everything at least forgiven underwater? is what I would have asked the woman in the water if I could have, but I did not really want to know the answer.

I did not know what to do with a vanquished Mama. I saw her hurt, but I still thought she could overcome it. She never spoke of it, so to me, it was another thing to add to the load she carried. “Everyone has their own burden, Libertie,” she was fond of telling me whenever I complained about my inability to do arithmetic or when another girl was mean or petty. So I thought she could solve this setback, that it was temporary, that it was something Mama could fix with her cleverness.

Once, in her office, I found the discards of her attempts at praise for the other women, written on the backs of notes to the pharmacist and on the discarded labels of old medicine bottles.

You’ve done fine work, and I look forward to your work improving even more.

Although at first I was not sure, I see now you are a true Christian woman.

It was as if she could not, in spite of herself, break her reserve and warmly compliment any of these women, who’d discarded her from their care.

“You see, I am not very talented at this.”

I started. Mama was standing beside me, watching me read her weak words. I think it was the first time she admitted a failing to me.

I felt a little flush of embarrassment for her.

“Libertie,” she said, “write something for me. Kind, but not too kind. Nothing that would inspire envy.”

“You cannot do it?”

“I do not have a way with words, like you do.” She sighed. Then she said, very quietly, “The only good poem I’ve ever written is you. A daughter is a poem. A daughter is a kind of psalm. You, in the world, responding to me, is the song I made. I cannot make another.”

My heart filled but quickly sank, because what freeborn thing can bear to be loved as much as that?

The least I could do was write a poem for her.

They were supposed to be anonymous. That was the whole point. It was my job at the meeting to take the unsigned works out of the box and read them to the room, with no bias. At the next meeting, when I took out the paper written in my own hand but elongated to look like Mama’s, I stood up before them all and sang the love my mama had for the women there. The love she would have sung, if she’d had the voice for it.

True women friends are fine and rare

You search for them, here and there

The bonds between us bloom like a rose

For we are companions true affection has chose

Within our hearts lie trust and faith

Our true friendship, bonds will never break

Mama was not a good poet. Neither, at fourteen, was I.

But those women heard that awful poetry and smiled and clapped, and when I revealed it was my mama who wrote it, they said, “Very fine, Dr. Sampson. Very fine indeed.” It was as if she had proven that she was one of them again, because she could praise them so warmly, even if the praise was clumsy. Maybe because of that. It was what they had been waiting for, and there was a kind of thawing in their relations.

Even rude love is better than no show of love at all. That must be why you took Ben Daisy, I thought to the woman in the water.

That is how I remember the rest of the war: my hands covered in the flour dust from long-baked biscuits at the bottom of the tin of love poems, the tips of my fingers stained with black ink, and Mama searching for every opportunity to be useful. I learned during the war how to scheme for the best way to set the world right, to change it. And I knew that this change was wrapped up in the love notes these women wrote to one another and dropped into a box, even as the world around us burnt.

Which world was burning, anyways? I wrote this question out to her, the woman in the water. After each meeting of the Ladies’ Intelligence Society, I took what little bits were left of the poems and made a book of my own.

What did Ben Daisy say she liked? Pink and white and gold. Cakes and candy. Scent bottles and silk. I left pansies alone, but I collected everything else I could for her.

These things were hard to come by in our hamlet. We did not eat or buy sugar, because slaves made it—Mama was one of the few who were righteous enough to observe this boycott. But then, with the war, it wasn’t to be had anyways. So I took to dripping honey in the pages of the book, underlining each question to the lady with a thick golden smear. Into the honey, I pressed flower petals, and then I let the page dry and started another one.

The songs I wrote in my book were made for the woman under the water, the one who offered something other than this world.

Is the water really better?

Should we all just try to drown?

Is your love better than this world?

Which world is burning, anyways?

I thought it was the world that drove Ben Daisy under the water, that kept Pete Back Back pocked with sores, that conspired to steal and beat and kill the children of the women around as soon as they left their wombs. So, what was there, really, to mourn? In annihilation, I saw a celebration. My book to the lady became a place to celebrate the destruction of all the devices of this world that had tried to snare my people and snap us in two, that had sworn to kill every last one of us one way or another.

And even as the wider world did not agree, did not even care what the women around me thought or believed, discounted colored women as entirely irrelevant—the thing to remember, I learned, was that these women, here, loved one another and cared for one another as no other. Even for my shifty, jumpy, defeated Mama, they cared. And from that care grew a steady foundation.

WHEN THE WAR ended, I ran through the streets with everyone else, crying and saying my hosannas. Finally, the world I had dreamt of, had prayed for, was on its way.

A bunch of us colored girls and boys ran all the way down to the waterfront. We danced on the boards of the wharf, and I even leaned over the side to whisper into the waves of the water a “Thank you.” I half believed, even though I knew I was fooling myself, that this was all her doing.