We left the riverbank at dawn, headed for home, and I walked backward the whole way, while the other girls laughed and the boys called me silly. I looked toward the river. I watched the sky for fires and probed the earth for blood.

Now, the newspapers were full of longing, not battles. White people longing for their sons’ bodies, hoping they were whole. If their bodies did not come back intact, then what would happen to these good white Christian boys on Judgment Day? They would stand up in their graves and topple back down, as on some overgrown battlefield their errant leg or lost foot would rise without the rest of them. They made it sound like a horror. But I read each notice as the reports rolled in during that jostling year after the war, and prayed to the woman who had taken Ben Daisy under Keep their arms scattered and their legs separated. Keep them without integrity when Judgment Day comes.

It was a small price to pay, in my opinion. The war had broken bodies apart, and that seemed to be what caused so much terror among the whites, what made them shoot their own president. But I had stood in Culver’s back room and seen the people broken from slavery, I had held that orphan girl in my arms, I had seen so many die from those same white people’s hatred that I could not muster any sympathy for their terror, and I could definitely not feel it on my own.

They did not care for us. I would not care for them. I would only care for the women around me, the woman in the water, and Mama, of course.

It was the closest I’d come, at that point in my life, to a state of jubilee. Something that people had told us was impossible for two hundred years was here—colored people were free, the slaveholders were defeated, and everything around me led me to believe that it would be this way forever.

IT WAS FINALLY time for the Ladies’ Intelligence Society to show their care for the world, which they did with a building they bought for Mama’s hospital downtown. They decided that a location near the wharfs could serve more of the colored women in Kings County, and maybe some others adventurous or rich enough to take a boat from lower Manhattan. A COLORED WOMEN’S HOSPITAL was painted carefully on the sign there, and we all cheered when it was finally raised up and nailed above the door.

The women of the LIS painted the walls of Mama’s hospital waiting room a deep red and raised money for the padded leather benches there. Walking into it was like walking into some expensive womb. It was dark and warm and designed to calm the patient, while she sat, scared, shocked by the betrayals of her own body.

When patients climbed the stairs to the examination rooms, they were called to a kind of rebirth. They passed through a hallway painted a deep, peaceful white and emerged onto a floor with wide windows and the white muslin curtains Mama put such stock in. They rose to a world of light. In the bright light, their bodies were not a shame, not a secret, and they were examined by the light of the sun “as the good Lord intended,” as Mama would say. For some of the women, it was the first time they had ever exposed as much as their stomach to the sun, and sometimes they would break into tears, overwhelmed by the light. But even the most conservative of them, the ones who insisted there must be something indecent about all that brightness, came back to Mama and the hospital, to be tended.

As Mama and Lenore examined them, and I stood back, ready to assist, Mama named each part of a woman as she touched it. “This is your sternum. This is your rib. Here is your navel, but you knew that. Here, what I push on here, is your womb and your ovaries. This is your mons pubis. These are is your labia, minora and major. This is your prepuce. Pardon.”

I stood in those examination rooms, and I heard her say this every day, to every woman, like a kind of benediction. And when I was not with her in the hospital, when she had me stay at the house to tend the garden or look after the land, sometimes in the middle of the day, I lay in the garden, felt the hot earth on my skin, and contemplated how my own limbs joined together. I traced for myself my sternum, my ribs, my navel, my womb, which I imagined as empty and small as a coin purse, my ovaries, which I could palpate with my own hand, my own mons pubis, my own labia, which I touched and thought the thrill I felt was merely the daring of touching something private in the light of the sun.

It was so quiet at the house without Mama and Lenore that I listened to my own pulse, could track my own breath, could maybe even hear my own body growing.

My mother was giving me the great gift that no other Negro girl my age, anywhere on Earth, I am sure, had experienced before. What other Negro girl had the freedom to lie in a garden on a workday afternoon? Because of this, I was not scared or disgusted by my body changing, as I knew other girls were.

I’m sweating jewels, was how I explained it in my book to the woman in the water. Red rubies in my drawers, yellow pearls at the seams of my blouse, black diamonds across the bridge of my nose. I eagerly wrote to her about the wonderful rude shock that came when I woke up one day and realized that I now smelled like a woman. I will be what Mama knows, what Miss Annie and the LIS know, what we study all day in her hospital, I wrote.

One day at the house in a planning meeting, as the women talked about how to raise just a hundred more dollars, two hundred, to keep the hospital open, Miss Annie sniffed loudly while I walked by and said, “Womanhood is nothing but tears and sorrow.” Then she looked at me. “I can smell it on you, Black Gal.”

I was not offended, because I knew Mama saw honor in my changing body—how my measurements grew millimeter by millimeter, how the numbers that described me shifted. She told me she was proud. It was as if the change in my body was one she had willed herself, not the same cycle every other girl went through.

I think Mama thought if she gave me that space, I would reproduce her spirit and her will in exact measure. Like a cell dividing itself.

This new world of adult busyness and abundance that Mama was building at the hospital seemed as robust as my own body. I saw them as one and the same—that Mama’s fortunes were changing right when my body was felt like a kind of omen, one I thanked the woman in the water for. I thought she had heard my cries for blood and revenge and was making them real for me, in the sweetest way possible: in Mama’s prosperity.

I did not even realize that what I had grown into was a different person than my mother until she had COLORED painted off the hospital sign. She sent for a boy to do it maybe a year and a half after the hospital was open, after the fourth or fifth charity bazaar the LIS had run that came back with diminishing funds. All over the country, colored people were building things that seemed bigger than Mama’s hospital for women, that the colored men and white people preferred to fund.

The possibilities for colored people seemed so many, so varied, each more fantastic than the last, but which one was right and which one should they choose? If I could have, I would have chosen all of them—every idea, one after the other, seemed correct. A school for freedmen; a letter service to reunite those separated by the auction block; a caravan to Canada; another one to Kansas; Mama’s hospital. Why can’t we have all of it, all of it? I wanted to say.

The Ladies’ Intelligence Society told Mama they could not raise the money solely for her hospital, in the way that they could during the war. And certainly not solely for a hospital just for colored women, when colored men were back and needed healing more. “We do not like it,” Miss Annie said, “but we think people will be more amenable to your cause if we raise money for you and other things.”

Mama did not even bat an eye. She only nodded, once, and said, “Well, then.”

And so Mama decided to change the hospital name. “It’s a sign of the reconciliation, of the harmony of the times we now live in,” Mama said to me and Lenore as we stood beside her, looking up at the boy on his ladder in the street. “Here it is, only two years after the end of the war, and white women will sit side by side colored women in our hospital waiting room, willing to be treated because they know, deep down, their organs are the same.”