“I was saying to Miss Experience—”

Louisa snorted at that.

“Experience,” I corrected myself, uncertain, “that if you needed to practice teaching a pupil, I am happy to do that with you.”

“Do you sing, then?”

“A little. In church, of course.”

“Well, come to where we practice. Near the market plots, by the river. It’s easier there,” Louisa said. And then she carefully pulled her hand out of mine and linked arms with Experience.

It was easy enough to convince them to let me listen to them practice. It was harder to learn their histories. Louisa was the more personable of the two. She was witty and liked to flirt with the boys, and even the lightest ones flirted back with her, because of the mark and her height and her chins. It was clear, everyone knew, that this was only in fun. She could imitate any animal sound with a whistle or a fold of her tongue—the call of a loon, the cluck of a turkey, the growl of a cat in the bush. She would use this menagerie to give a running commentary on the affairs of everyone at college. The handsomest boy, she referred to with the lurch of a katydid, and the prettiest, stubbornest girl, with a billy goat’s whinny. Everybody liked Louisa.

Experience was harder to know—she seemed to walk about in a kind of mist, the only thing dispelling it the sound of an instrument or Louisa’s voice. She was terribly serious about music. She could play any instrument you put in front of her. Her most prized possession was a small, battered metal pitch pipe. When I and the other students would gather to sing with her, she liked to mournfully blow it to call us to attention.

She would sit in the bare square of the future green, her skirts spread out before her, working on her scores, making notations, following the scrip of music.

I learned that Louisa and Experience were not from the same place. Louisa was from Virginia, and Experience was from South Carolina. That’s all they would tell me when I accosted them, giddy with the sound of their breath, after the first practice. The way they said it, quietly, with no more elaboration, I understood that they had been born enslaved, and that they were not prepared to tell me who or what they’d fought with to end up here, singing beauty in a cabin in the fields.

Willkommen,

lieber

sch?ner Mai,

Dir t?nt der V?gel

Lobgesang

was what they sang in a round that first afternoon by the river.

And then, when they combined their voices, it was another thing altogether. I believed that to attempt to sing with them in harmony would be like pouring bacon grease into a vat of water.

But Louisa said, “I cannot trust you if you do not sing. Why are you around the two of us? Just to listen?”

“I’m not very good,” I said.

Experience shrugged impatiently. “That’s not possible.”

“Not as good as you,” I said.

Louisa sighed. “False modesty wins you no friends, you know.”

So I took a breath in. And I did it.

When I sang with Experience and Louisa, it was as if my very self merged with them. I was, I learned, a mezzo-soprano, and they each took pains to teach me how to make my voice stronger.

“You draw in air here,” Louisa said, pointing.

When I sang with them, my whole history fell away. There was no past, no promised future, only the present of one sustained note. When we sang together, we three stood in a round so that we could see one another’s faces—and it was almost unbearable, to sing a song and watch Louisa’s face change slightly and Experience’s voice respond, and then my own, struggling for just a minute to reach theirs.

When I sang with them, I entered something greater than my sorry, bitter self.

I thought that anyone with a voice as powerful as that could teach me how to bend my anger to my will. I sat on that riverbank, and I thought that I had finally found my ambition. It was not to set bones right or to become my mother’s double. It was to befriend the both of them, to make them love me and sing to me for the rest of my life. I knew this was a silly wish, but in my discombobulation at Cunningham College, I did not stop to question it. I knew enough to keep it quiet, to not speak it outright—not to Experience or Louisa, whom I did not wish to scare away, and not to Mrs. Grady, and certainly not to Mama. I spent the rest of the semester doing the bare minimum of work so I would not fail out of class and so I could keep meeting the two girls and have them sing to me.

Mama had told me freedom would come by following her, and I had known it was not true for a long time. Now I had someone else to follow, I was sure, and the thrill of having a new direction filled me up, blushed my cheeks, almost made me like the place. I put away my sticky journal to my imagined woman in the water and delighted in these real women, in front of me, made flesh.

“I wish my mama could hear you,” I said one afternoon. “I wish she could hear how fine you are.”

“I bet you wish your mama could do it,” Experience said, and though she was smiling slightly when she said it, I felt the sting in her words and I saw the bitterness in her eyes. I turned away, ashamed. I had said something wrong again.

Louisa took my arm in hers and walked with me a little farther down the riverbank. “You sure do talk about your mama a lot,” she said.

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

I looked down at my shoes. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s not something you should mind,” Louisa said. “It is hard for Experience because she lost hers. She doesn’t know where she is.”

“Oh.”

My rage burnt for an affront that was far less than hers. And here were the two of them not even hot, not even warm, just righteously cool in their voices. I had hoped that there would be a place where I found other burning bushes like me, willing to make the world anew with riotous anger. The fact that they had none unnerved me.

“But you do talk about your mother a lot, you do know?” Louisa gently chided. “It is always what your mama would think or what she would say or what she would like to say. Sometimes, I think your mama’s here with us on this riverbank.”

I walked on, in silence, ashamed again, until we heard a loud, rude croak from a frog ahead of us, more like a belch.

“See,” Louisa said. “There she go,” and I swatted her arm in laughter.

Dear Mama,

I have met the two most extraordinary girls, whose voices

Dear Libertie,

Today we had an interesting case: a young Hebrew serving girl

I believe can lead us to a kind of promised land. I know that sounds like a

with inflammation of the uvula and palate and an inclination to swallow

fancy and like a dream, but that’s what their singing is like to me. Together,

during the night.

they could be the greatest singers our world has yet heard.

What would you prescribe, Libertie?

Dear Mama,

Do you remember, Mama, when there was the bad fever a few years ago? And the churches took to pealing bells to count the dead? Two tolls for a man, three tolls for a woman, one for a child. And how at night you would hear each ring of the bell, and wait, wait, wait for the next ring—whose life were you hearing called out? Whose life was coming to you through the dark? The Graces’ singing is like that. Except you’re waiting to hear about life beginning, not ending. And it is marvelous.

PS. I would prescribe, I think, Cimicifuga.

Dear Libertie,

I remember that, of course, Libertie, but I’m not sure what you mean by the rest. I am glad you are finding amusement there, but please do not forget your purpose.

Yesterday, a woman came to me with a toothache, caused by the damp night air. What would you prescribe?

Mama—

Nux m., cepa, rhus. Wind: aeon., puis., rhus, sil. Draught: bell., calc, chin., sulph.

Libertie

I would go to the barrels of water Madeline Grady kept in her yard and take off the cover and try to catch my reflection in the black-silver surface there. She once found me like this, and I said, by way of explanation, “I am not a good daughter.”

“Well, that’s just pure nonsense if I ever heard it.”

“I don’t think I can be what she wishes me to be,” I said. “I feel too much, and she’s never felt like this at all.”

Madeline Grady fixed me with a hard stare. “I’ve never met a girl as hard-pressed on making life difficult for herself as you, Libertie,” she said. “Usually, it’s men get caught in that current. I always thought women had more sense. But I suppose you live long enough, you see everything.” And she sucked her teeth and looked for her wooden ladle, and I hated her, a little bit, for seeing me so well.

I’d rather have had my mother and her obliviousness. There is a greater comfort in being unseen than being understood and dismissed.

Sometimes, I thought Madeline Grady was wiser than any of us, but Experience and Louisa were not admirers of her. When they found out where I lived, they exchanged a look that I eagerly asked them to explain.

“What? What is it?”

“Well,” Louisa said, “Mr. Grady is a sad man.”