I sat down in the parlor, in the seat in the corner where I’d watched my mother plan and plot and scheme and heal. Where I’d loved her and wanted only her understanding. I sat there for a long time, as the room darkened around me, as I heard her move about upstairs in her regular ambulations. I had my little book in my lap, full of notes to my woman in the water, but I could not write now. I saw my own handwriting, childish and looping large, and I thought of what she would think if she saw it, and I imagined she would feel only disgust with me, what I imagined was the same disgust my mother felt now, walking about her office, setting things right for the workday tomorrow. Mama had fled into her mind, away from me—and I should be used to the cold by now, I should, but I still could not bear it.

It was a question of good. I had never doubted before that Mama was good. But here she was, discounting everything I asked in exchange for the money of these women, for the sake of the gold lettering on her building downtown. I could not, in all conscientiousness, call that righteous or good.

I am a fool, and maybe you are, too, I wrote in the book, and then I closed it, and sat back, and cried.

The next morning, we rode into downtown as if nothing had happened—Mama telling me the tasks ahead. Indeed, it felt worse to know that our reckoning had not even been a reckoning for her, it seemed, just a slight annoyance at the end of the day. Here was another break between us. She could not even see when we were at odds with each other.

I thought it had not affected her at all, until a few weeks later when she looked up from her books as I brought her a cup of tea one night and said, her voice cool but her face blushing slightly, “Cunningham College in Ohio has accepted you for further studies. I think it’s for the best, don’t you? I have taught you all I can here.” She took off her glasses and smiled wanly at me. “I think I cannot teach you anymore.”

I did not even protest. I said nothing and understood I was to leave her, had been banished, for wishing her to ask more of the world around us.

Se lè yon sous seche, moun konn valè dlo

It’s when the spring goes dry that people appreciate the value of water

She sent me away, so I’d send her away, too, I resolved. I would banish her from the very recesses of my heart, from my consciousness, to forge a new self that had not ever been touched by my mother.

In the weeks leading up to my departure, she did not speak to me of it at all. It was Lenore who directed how to pack my trunk, told me what route I should travel, reminded me to never look a strange man in the eye. Mama went about her work as if I would be there with her forever.

So she wants silence, I wrote to the lady. I’ll give her the silence of the grave.

On the morning I left, she told Lenore to take me to the ferry to Manhattan. “I should stay at the hospital,” she said. But as I climbed into the cart, she stopped and held my hand and kissed it, in that same desperate way I’d seen her do to Madame Elizabeth.

“You write to me, you hear?” she said, her voice strangled. “You write to me everything that happens to you so I can know it.”

I kept my hand in hers for as long as I could. Let me stay with you, and I wouldn’t have to write anything at all, is what I wished to say. But I only said, “Yes, Mama.”

And then she threw my hand away, and the silence rose up between us again, as inevitable and heavy as an ocean’s wave.

Dear Mama,

The train was tolerable. The stagecoach was not. I had to sit on the top, at the back, because at first I was the only Negro traveling and there was a white family, moving to Ohio. The wife did not want me to sit beside her or her children. But after the first stop, a Negro man and his son joined me. The man was named Mr. Jonathan, and he taught me how to press my body forward into the wind. He said it was the best way to endure the ride. He told me I have a habit of looking back over my shoulder at the road behind us, and that is no good when you are traveling through open country.

The land here is strange. I find it all too flat. Not like the hills in Kings County. The air, though—that, I can concede, is better. The first few days out of New York, my nose dripped a thin black liquid that made the coachman laugh. He told me it was all the soot of the city, fleeing my nostrils. I must confess, I bunched my cloak into the balls of my hands and rubbed my nose at his rudeness.

The stagecoach left me in a town called Butterfield, and the college is five miles farther than that. There was one cart waiting to make a mill run, luckily, that agreed to take us—otherwise I would have walked the five miles, pulling the twenty pounds of clothing and quilts and books in my trunk behind me.

On the ride into school, I sat beside two other girls, one plump, one stout, both with skin the color of damp sand. The thin one leaned in to all three of us and said, “At night, you can’t see nothing in these fields. You, for instance, out in those fields you’d be nothing but eyes and teeth.”

I knew it was a joke, but when I heard it, it shot through me and I spent the rest of the ride turning suddenly, trying to catch, out of the corner of my eye, glimmers of teeth and eyes from the fields. Or maybe just another girl as dark as me who folded down into molars and corneas as soon as the sun set.

I will stop myself from speculating further. I know you do not like poetry. I will write another letter to you when I’ve gathered enough facts, not just impressions, for your liking.

Your

Libertie

I had resolved to wash her influence off me like dust from the road. But everything in that place she’d banished me to looked to me exactly like Mama. The gray sky that arched above me was the same color as her front tooth, and the fields smelled like the inside of her shawl, and the wind in the trees, I thought, sounded just like the whisper of her voice when she was being urgent.

The cart stopped a quarter of a mile before it reached campus, in front of a wide, low log cabin, set back a little, with a short, rough-hewn fence in the front.

As I headed up the path in the dusk, my trunk trailing behind me, the door opened. A woman stood there. When I reached her, I realized she was shorter than me—the top of her kerchief only came up to my shoulder. She was almost as dark as me, too. She looked up at me, laughed at my dirt-smeared face. “You look like you walked here from Brooklyn,” she said.

She came out behind me and pushed me inside. “Leave the trunk,” she said. “One of the boys will get it.”

This was where I was to board—the home of an old friend of Mama’s, Franklin Grady. He was from Kings County, too, and had moved out west to study law at Cunningham College, run for over twenty years by abolitionists, an experiment in Negro education. The woman who greeted me was Grady’s wife, Madeline.

Grady had been there since before the war, since the days of spiriting away, and now that war was over and there were so many ways for a Negro to get ahead, he had chosen to stay at the college, to become its first Negro dean of law. Indeed, as Mama had told me, all the teachers were Negroes—drawn out to these fields to grow the teachers and doctors and farmers and lawyers our race would need in freedom.

I realized that Mama had sent me to a place that was the antithesis of her hospital. There would be no white students behind a velvet curtain in the classrooms of Cunningham College, claiming reconciliation. But Mama also knew, as did I, that I couldn’t get away with the trick she’d pulled so many years ago—register at a white medical school and be taken for merely a white woman, not a colored one, until first semester marks came through.

The Grady household was not like mine. There were three rooms—the big front one, with the hearth, the back room, where Grady, Madeline, and the three children slept, and then a smaller room, where Mr. Grady’s books were kept and where he went to work on the cases that came his way. The main room was hot. Hanging from the ceiling, draped over every beam and surface, were skirts and shirts and pants. Enough clothing for a regiment. “Keep looking,” Madeline Grady said as I craned my neck up to stare at the ceiling beams through the leg hole of a pair of bloomers. “They’ll be here till Wednesday.”

Then she moved off, out the door to the yard, where more clothing hung out to dry.

She did not ask me to follow her, and I was at a loss as to what to do, so I sat down on my trunk and waited, while the two boys who were supposed to help me drag it in stood in front of me and stared. “Hello,” I said, and they both ran off with a start to hold on to their mother.

Mrs. Grady came back in to the room and began to pull down some of the skirts and shirts and throw them over her arm. I moved to help, but she held up her hand. “There’ll be time enough for that once you’re properly settled in. Sit still. Play at being a lady,” she said, and then laughed again.

I stayed on the trunk, awkwardly. When she came back in again, she pushed one of the boys forward, who held out a branch he’d broken off from the oak tree out front.

“Well, take it, then. Beat the dust out you, at least,” Mrs. Grady said.