So that was it. The perimeter of this world, the one I had tried to escape to, was color. I recalled, with bitterness, that Mrs. Grady did not know how to read, but she sure knew how to count. In this world, the lighter girls were unsure what to make of me—by birth, I should have been their peer. But I was not, somehow, and I was studying to become something closer to a man, not what they understood as ambition.

I spent a lot of time in the outbuilding that had been newly designated as a library, books piled all around me, not reading a word. Instead, I read the books’ frontpieces. Many had been donated by churches from across the East. There was an entire lot from one congregation in Philadelphia; another from a congregation in Albany, a stack that had the x’s and handprints of a flock in Virginia. I would trace all the names of all these people who believed that I could be part of a bright shining future, but I couldn’t bear to turn the page and begin to read.

It had been very easy to denounce Mama to her face and call her a traitor in my heart. I’d thought it was painful, but it was the easiest thing in the world compared with sitting here, feeling the weight of my mother’s expectations and the world’s indifference to my failure and my self. Mrs. Grady had taken to calling to me, as I left for class, “Go on, Black Gal, make me proud,” and though I smiled at her each time she said it, knew she meant it with love, I could only hear a lie in her voice.

My rage at the world returned whenever I sat in that library. I knew what a stronger girl would do—sip her wrath like corn liquor, have it drench her ambition, sweat the rage out her pores as she worked harder and better, be smarter. But instead I suckled my anger like Lenore did the abandoned offspring of the barn cats, and it was about as effective as one of those little animals, doing nothing but mewling and flipping over in distress.

I knew I was not strong enough to touch a hundred white abdomens while feeling their contempt, while Mama stood beside me saying nothing. I did not think I was strong enough to pretend, even ten years on now, that the sons and husbands and fathers of the white women who sat behind our clinic’s velvet curtain hadn’t marked our houses with red chalk for destruction. And I knew, like the ache of a broken bone that hadn’t been set right, that I was not strong enough to be faced with another Mr. Ben, and to fail him, and to have to live with that failure for the rest of my days.

I was not strong enough for this world, is what I meant, and it was a low-down, worming thing to discover about yourself when all around you, men and women who had been beaten, scorned, burnt, drowned, still found a way to come to this silence and sit within it and answer questions about what a lung was good for.

I began to think there must be something wrong with me: that I was slow or stupid, or merely ungrateful. Most of all, I felt a deep, burning shame in the center of my chest, that I could not work my rage better. When Mama was my same age, she had already finished her studies and was submitting herself to examination after examination, to try to enter medical school. She was working, in the evenings, with the local pharmacist, to learn how pills were made, and she was conducting her own experiments, and writing to friends to send the latest medical books to her to study.

But here I was, with an entire library open to me at midday, and I couldn’t read a word.

I was only dull, hidden Libertie.

Dear Libertie,

You must make sure to ask that the latest anatomy books be found for you. The following is a comprehensive list of authors to trust:

Dear Mama,

The college’s library is tolerable. The books have been donated by many kind churches. I’ve read the frontpieces of each and seen books from

Drs. Henshaw, Borley, Crawley and Madison and Fredricks (the older)

Ohio, Delaware, Virginia (of course), Connecticut, and even Maine.

For your review, I present you the following case: A girl came with Adipsia.

I must say that I miss you, and even Lenore (tell her she’s a busybody), and if I

She had neither appetite nor thirst, and the thought of food was disgusting.

could but see you & stand beside you two & hear your voices,

So, in your professional opinion (ha), my good girl, what would you give

I would perhaps not be so lonely here, with you, but that’s a silly thing

as remedy?

to wish, I know.

This impotent anger was another kind of grave. I thought I would be buried in it on campus, until one day when Madeline Grady chased me out of her house and told me to stay at the college for the evening “with the youth your own age.” So one evening, when the dark came sooner, I did not hurry home to the Gradys’ but wandered around campus until a few girls told me to follow them. And that is when I heard it. It was the queerest thing to hear the sound of a piano at night, outside, but I could hear it—the deep tones of the notes and then after it, the whisper of the hammer hitting the strings, because it was an older piano and someone was tuning it.

Music at night, music after dark, music finding its way to you across sweetgrass, can feel almost like magic.

A bunch of students, men and women, had gathered in one of the music classrooms, where a slanting upright piano had been pushed against a wall. Standing at it were two women, pushing the keys. It was a student-run affair—the room was decorated with holly and ivy, and there was hot cider, donated by one of the farms, and roasted apples and sugared biscuits. It was so hot that the windows were open to the cold night air, and from where I stood, pressed against one of them, my back stung with cold and the full front of me steamed with discomfort.

The first to perform was a sleek and chubby boy who had memorized his own dreary poetry—rhyming couplets intended to celebrate the beauty of the seasons but that thumped along forever. Then there was a girl who read a monologue, in the voice of Theda—a scandalous thing. And finally, for wholesomeness’ sake, the Graces.

And then the two women who had been at the piano stood. Louisa Habit and Experience Northmoor. Louisa sang alto and Experience sang soprano. The two of them singing together, that first night I went out, made a kind of joyful noise—sweeter than what it sounded like when the LIS sang together at home or when the choir sang on Sunday. I watched them as they sang—I could see, under the cloth of their bodices, where their lungs expanded for more air, where they were holding in their stomachs to force out the lighter sound. To watch Experience and Louisa sing was the same as seeing a fast, small boy run or a man swing an ax and break up a tree. It was the same singularity of form and muscle, the same pushing of a body toward a single point on the horizon. I wanted, right then and there, to be as close to them as I possibly could.

Experience was tall and thin, with sharp elbows, and skin like a bruised peach. When she stood up to sing, she slumped her shoulders, as if she was afraid of her own height. Louisa, in contrast, was short, and as dark as me, and fat, with a flare of a burn scar down her forehead, which draped dramatically over her left eye. Whoever had tended to it when she’d gotten it had done well—it was nearly perfectly healed, only a dark flush color and, of course, raised above the rest of her smooth skin. She made up for it with pretty, round cheeks that flushed with red undertones whenever she took in breath to sing more loudly, and when she opened her mouth, I could see she had perfect pearls for teeth.

Mama had taught me long ago—the first tell of good health is the mouth. Louisa has probably never had a toothache, I thought, longingly. Experience, on the other hand, most definitely had. When she wasn’t singing, she kept her fist curled at the bottom of her chin, at the ready to cover her mouth whenever she was called upon to speak, because her bottom teeth were rotten.

I imagined a whole life for them there, while I watched. I thought they would never be what Madeline Grady said everyone at the college was: colorstruck. They moved together as they sang, and I thought they had found an escape from this world. I thought if I got as close as possible, I could maybe escape, too.

When the evening was over, I stood beside them.

“You are wonderful,” I said to Experience. Her eyes widened, and her shoulders shot back. I had startled her. I regretted it immediately.

“Well, thank you,” she said.

“You and Louisa, you are both really marvelous.”

“Mm-hmm,” she said uneasily. She was looking through the crowd, for her companion.

“Are you first-years here? I haven’t seen you yet.”

“This is our second year here. We are close to graduation. We are the only two women in the music department,” Experience said. “We wish, I wish, to be music teachers.” She had spotted Louisa, and made to move toward her. I followed, determined to keep speaking.

“If you wish to practice teaching,” I said, “then I would make an excellent practice pupil.”

“Who’s this?” Experience had reached Louisa, with me trailing behind, and now they both were looking at me, Louisa expectant, Experience as if she wanted to flee.

“Libertie Sampson,” I said. I held out my hand for a strong handshake—a gesture my mother had taught, which the proctors here, at least, discouraged.

Louisa took it, and I started to speak again.