Mother

My anger had retreated in the face of my confusion at this new place, but now it came back, in such a rush that it made the letter tremble in my hand. I read it and read again—astonished. I read only for her cruelty then, not her longing. Her longing, I thought in a blaze of fury, was irrelevant and probably false.

There was no theater that admitted colored patrons downtown, so she had passed, as easily as that, to see her Macbeth and her silly play, in order to be able to talk more directly with her patients. A feat she would not have dared if I had been home and at her side. I crumpled the page up, tore it into smaller and smaller pieces, threw them into the wind as I walked to the Gradys’ door.

I cannot not share myself with her, I told myself. My hand trembled again, slightly, at the memory of the strength of her hand holding mine. Write me so I know where you are.

But if she did not want my rage, which part of me did she wish to know the location of?

Dear Mama,

The college has remarkably progressed in the twenty years since its founding. I know you would be very proud of what the race has been able to accomplish here, what Negro men and women have been able to build when we take care of our own.

When the college began, classes were held in an abandoned barn on a stretch of land that the ten founders saved and schemed to buy. Over the years, they have saved to erect, one by one, additional buildings, so that today there is a lecture hall as fine as anything in Brooklyn, complete with old logs set up as columns. Beside each log is a chisel, and the male students, when they have an idle moment, drive the chisels into the wood, to flute the columns and make them truly Ionic. They are already half done.

There is a small chapel, used in shifts on Sundays, since it is the only colored church for many miles. People come from all over, not only the students, to worship there. There is a full brick building set up as the main hall, and another building where some of the students and teachers eat and sleep. It is all arranged around a bald square of dirt that will soon sprout grass and be the campus common. The agriculture students tend to it each day. Past the square and four buildings is the road into town, and then only the fields. At night, the lanterns in the windows of the college are the only light for many miles.

The college is run under the strict belief that silence is a sign of great intellect. Work begins at 5 a.m.—the boarders are expected to wake and wash, and then most of the students are assigned duties to keep the campus running. The young men clear brush, chop wood, construct outbuildings, and grow the small field of wheat and the market plots down near the river. The girls clean the campus, launder, and cook the food for all faculty and students. I am exempt, as a day student. But every day, as I walk from the Gradys’ to class, I pass my classmates bent over in the fields.

The oddest thing is that we are expected to even do hard labor in silence. No one is allowed to sing any of the songs we all know to make work go faster. If anyone starts the melody to make work not so weary, he is dismissed from his post and sent to work alone in the woodshed.

It is a very queer custom, one that makes the campus dreary, in my opinion, though everyone else does not seem to think so. When chores are over, the campus erupts into chatter, and people laugh and talk again, as if nothing had happened.

Love

Dear

Libertie,

Silence is a virtue, and it is good that you learn this now. I am so glad to hear the college is thriving and that you are finding a home there.

You did not send back any notes on the botany lecture I sent. I suspect they have perhaps passed this letter in the mail, or maybe you are so deep in study you have forgotten to send. Make sure you do when you have a moment. I am curious of your opinion.

You must also make sure that you are avoiding any strong spices. Does Mrs. Grady cook with onions? It is not healthful for you. Be sure to continue your exercises twice daily—rotate the ankles, flex the wrists—to stay flexible.

You also must send me your list of classes, the names of your professors, and which books they have asked you to read. I am enclosing three articles from the latest Journal of Homeopathy, and I ask that you write back your analysis of the arguments and your rebuttal, if any, and send to me as soon as you are able.

Your

Mother

I would send her nothing. I had nothing to give her except petty rebellions like this.

The other girl students were all assigned to the courses for teaching. They were taking the ladies’ course of study, which was concerned with how to best direct a class. I was the only woman in the men’s course, the only girl taking biology and chemistry and rhetoric.

In lecture, I sat at the front, a bit to the side, at a separate desk. The men all sat on rows of benches. I could not pay attention to lectures and take my notes and see them at the same time, but I was aware of them there, behind me. When I’d first walked into the lecture room, I had wrinkled my nose—I had not smelled anything like that before. Not a bad smell, just the heavy murk of young men that was caught up in that hall. It was so overpowering I was not sure if I could even differentiate one man from the other. They were just a cloud of scent, pressing at my back as I tried to sketch the shape of a fibula. I smelled it everywhere on campus, and it made me long for the company of women even more.

The boys were polite enough—they waved to me at the end of class sometimes. But that was not enough company for me, and I was lonely. I would have tried to befriend the girls as we sat in the dining hall. In that room, though, we spoke only in whispers.

I learned there was a kind of hierarchy. There were some girls who had stolen themselves away before the war. They were a kind of aristocracy, and they tended to stick together. At meals, they bent their heads and spoke without even looking at one another—they had perfected a way to speak even below whispers, even beyond glances. Sometimes, in their silent language, one of them would communicate something to make another laugh, and it was in those moments that I felt it keenest that they were better than me. Not a single one of them would ever, I guessed, be as wasteful with their time here as I was, sitting at the front of a classroom of men and wondering what they thought of me. Those girls knew something about the world that I did not know, could never know.

Then there were the freeborn girls like me, from places like Philadelphia and Manhattan and Washington, DC. I should have naturally made friends with them. I heard them tell their histories to one another—their mothers were all, they claimed, “at home”; their fathers were clerks or tobacconists or preachers. No one would claim a mother or father who was a servant. It was strange since we all knew that each of us must have scrimped and saved to sit at that table. My own mother, in the weeks before I left, set the clinic’s books in front of me and showed me the column she had added for her calculations: Libertie’s Education. But not one girl would admit this fact. Something stopped me from telling them my mother was a doctor. I was not sure how they would respond—eagerness and solicitation seemed somehow worse than scorn. I did not want to still, hundreds of miles away, be relying on Mama for my position. So I chose to keep my distance from them until I could understand any of this better.

But the truth soon came out, and I began to catch them watching me. I only smiled at them and bowed my head and hurried on. My boldness had burnt away, and the strangeness of the place had engulfed me.

“You know, every last one of them up there at that college are colorstruck,” Madeline Grady said to me finally, after many nights at home beside her and her children.

“You’ve never heard of love of copper?” she said. “They’ll love us black ones if we make a lot of noise, but when we keep to ourselves, like you do, they don’t know what to do. But don’t worry. They’re young. You’re a pretty enough girl. One of the boys up there will peel away for you, like my Grady did for me, and leave those yellow girls behind. You just have to let him take his time.”

And that was another kind of humiliation. That she thought my solitude was a symptom of wanting love.