When Grady came home, that’s what I was doing—hitting my knees and ankles until the dust from the road danced in the air. I was the only one to greet him, because Mrs. Grady and the boys were back outside, wringing the last of the gray water out of strangers’ shirts.

Grady blinked at me once, twice. His cheeks flushed pink in the heat of the room—he was, perhaps, a little bit darker than Mama, and much, much lighter than his wife. But he was also clearly a Negro—he would not have been able to get by. He was short, too, with a round, pleasant face decorated with freckles and a broad, friendly nose, across the bridge of which perched the same small spectacles that Mama always wore.

When he saw me, though, he frowned as if I was a misplaced book.

“That’s the girl, Libertie,” Mrs. Grady called from the yard, and Grady grunted in response.

Later, at dinner, I told him, “Mama says thank you for your hospitality, and I do, as well,” but he only managed to mumble a reply into his soup.

“She’s asked me to give you this,” I said, and I handed him the small pamphlet on prayer by Reverend Harland that our church had commissioned to be printed to celebrate the end of the war.

“Well, go on. Thank her,” Mrs. Grady said. Let your own pickaninnies learn good grace.” That made him smile, slightly.

He glanced at the title, then read it aloud. THE GLORY OF TOMORROW it said in proud, correct letters.

“Mama doesn’t like that,” I said. “She says it assumes too much.”

“Huh,” Grady said. “Well, Cathy never did put too much stock in forecasting.”

“I, for one, agree with her on that,” Mrs. Grady said to her bowl of soup.

“But you know Reverend Harland,” I said. “He just refuses to respond to any of Mama’s hints about unseemliness.”

I blushed then, unsure if I had offended Grady with my irreverence.

He said nothing, only picked up the pamphlet carefully and carried it back to the room the rest of the family respected as his study.

It was to always be like that. He rarely stayed in a room when I entered. At first, I was sure the awkwardness would dissipate. Before I’d left home, the gossips at church had told me that Grady had been my mother’s sweetheart before she met my father. So I was curious to meet him, to see if he could explain her to me, tell me what she had been like when she was young and gay, before she’d become this woman I could not understand. But it was perhaps this past connection that made Grady wary of me.

And so, to learn about him, I was forced to watch his wife.

I could not determine what about her made her the reason Grady had never come back to Kings County but instead had chosen a place with fields full of eyes and teeth. Madeline Grady was nothing like my mother. She liked to gossip and she liked to sing loudly, off-tune. She told me once, sighing, that if she had to spend another night at the college listening to lectures about the Negro condition, she would maybe yawn so wide she’d swallow her own nose.

That first night, she watched me as I put my Bible and my anatomy book—the two books I had managed to pack—under the pillow next to the mess of blankets she’d set up for me by the hearth. “Lord,” she said, fanning the pages with her thumb, “imagine reading all of this. Sometimes I wonder.”

“Oh,” I said, understanding what she meant. And then I decided to be brave. “I could teach you,” I told her shyly.

She shook her head. “I said ‘sometimes,’ girl. Not all the time.” She laughed. “Grady reads enough for both of us.”

I lay on the cooling hearthstones and wondered. Just that night, before we all retired to bed, Grady had read from their family Bible and Mrs. Grady had sat beside him, a child on her knee, patting in time to the cadence of the words. But she does not wish to read them for herself? I thought. It was even more strange to me because at the college, though I had yet to meet them, I knew there were women who had scrimped and saved and walked a thousand miles to be able to read a book. There were women Madeline Grady’s age who stayed up late each night to learn the alphabet. And here she slept beside a man who not only read books but wrote them. And she’d never rolled over in bed and said, “Teach me.”

I stopped myself from thinking further then—it was bad enough that I could hear, in the dark, the whole family shifting and sighing and passing gas in the next room. I did not have to imagine the Gradys’ marital bed. But still, it was as if Grady and his wife lived in a kind of willed blindness.

I thought, I have never seen a more incurious woman. I thought, My mother is better than Madeline Grady, at least. I thought I was better, too.

Grady and his wife had married late, and their children were much younger than I was. They had a girl and two boys still in short pants. Grady, in contrast to his gruff indifference to my presence, doted on the boys and girl. He was always reaching for them—running his hand over the clipped scalps of the boys or suddenly squeezing the fat of the little girl’s knees. I had never seen, up close, a family with a father, and whenever Grady made one of his sudden attacks of affection, I felt my cheeks burn and I had to turn my eyes away because they stung, as if a glare from the sun had suddenly caught them. I could not shake the feeling that I was seeing something I was not supposed to see.

Being in Grady and Madeline’s house, I remembered the silence of my mother’s. All those evenings spent where the only sound was her breath as she sighed over her reading, and sometimes the surprise of a log breaking into fire in the hearth, and here, at the Gradys’, there was noise always around and within us. I realized that I had been raised up in something like a shroud, the muffling shroud of my mother’s grief—for my father and maybe for life. To be at the Gradys’ meant I was faced with life, and sometimes it felt like too much for my ears and my heart.

I would have written to my woman, if I could. But the Gradys’ house did not have the long stretches of privacy that living with Mama did. There was no place to hide away and write verses. No ground to lie on and build myself anew. Those first few days, overwhelmed by the thunder of Madeline Grady pouring water into tin tubs, I found a corner of the front room and sat, facing the wall, the shroud of other people’s laundry providing a cover. I had my book in my lap, my pen in my hand, when the youngest Grady toddled over and placed her chubby hands on my knees over and over again, until I put the paper aside to play with her.

The little girl tumbled away, satisfied. Through the piles of dirty petticoats, as I sat alone in the corner, I could hear Madeline Grady teaching her children her trade.

“Grady says a boy isn’t ready for a proper education till he’s seven,” she’d told me that first day, “but it’s never too early to learn to press.”

“You’ve got to press the memory out of ’em,” she told the children, who stood back in a circle, frightened of the heat, as she laid out each shirt and pulled the wrinkles out of the cloth. I heard the thud of the iron, the creak of the cotton, and I closed my eyes. When classes started, I told myself, I would be pressed clean at Cunningham—the wrinkles of my mother’s passivity and stunted ideas smoothed out of me.

As Mrs. Grady worked, the room filled with the smell of other people’s sweat, and she said, “Lord, it’d wake the dead.”

She said this constantly about her work and did not wait to hear a laugh in response, but I provided one, because I wasn’t sure what else to do. She teased Grady all the time, and he seemed to enjoy it. But for me … should I laugh at each one? Should I stay serious and ignore her? Should I add my own? She had a freedom I had never seen before. The freedom to laugh. Mama would have dismissed her for that. I felt myself doing the same, but then stopped.

The point of an education was to learn to do better, wasn’t it?

Dear Libertie,

I trust you are finding the Gradys’ home comfortable. I do not know what you mean when you say I do not approve of poetry. I am eager to hear of where you live now.

You did not ask about the hospital. It is doing very well. We are busier than ever, and Lenore has asked me to hire a girl to help her, now that you are gone. We have so many patients I fear we may have to turn some away. I have written to Madame Elizabeth for advice. Reverend Harland has suggested that we stop serving unmarried women, and that we cannot do, as you know.

Miss Annie put on a wonderful concert last Sunday, all the children singing truly beautifully. I went downtown to hear the most interesting lecture on botany—I have included a clip, describing what was said, from the Eagle. I have also been twice to the theater the past few weeks—a very good Macbeth and then something very silly that a patient told me all the girls go to see. I enjoyed both—even the sillier show, I think. I suspect you would have, as well.

Please write as soon as classes begin.

Your