And here, the letter continued, enumerating all the ways this Emmanuel was a wonder.

Emmanuel has brought with him an album … He is collecting all of the plants and wildlife of Haiti, and we spend evenings comparing the plant life of his homeland to that of Kings County.

Emmanuel has created a tea that sweetens the breath, which we are now able to offer our wealthier patients. Sales have boosted clinic revenues by 2 percent alone this month.

Emmanuel is an especial favorite of our child patients and has a light touch with even the most fearful ones.

I counted each time she wrote that name. I knew enough that it was ridiculous to be jealous of a name on paper, but I could not help it, though I dared not mention it to Madeline Grady—or Experience and Louisa.

Mrs. Cookstone is now complaining of a pain in her calf muscle, which she says she also feels in her left shoulder. Emmanuel has already prescribed something that has done wonders, but I’m wondering if you can guess what it was.

This was even worse, to be set against a rival I could not even see, in a race I was no longer particularly interested in but, because of pride, I could not abandon. She wrote of Emmanuel with the voice of a proud mother. She praised him in a way she had never praised me—except for that one time, so long ago, when Mr. Ben first came to us and she had stroked my cheek and said, “Libertie is beautiful.”

But she had never called me clever, or smart, or good with patients, or even particularly hardworking.

Now when she sent me problems to solve, she would write, Emmanuel has already found the answer, but I wonder if you can.

She did not send me cutouts from journals anymore, because Emmanuel has asked to study them and add to his own collection. She would send them to me when he was done.

Can you feel brotherly jealousy for a man you have never met? A figment of your imagination, a ghost of your mother’s convictions? I did. I could not even store her letters in my chest, beside my list of grades—I felt that somehow the letters would whisper to one another, and my mother would instinctively know, back home in Brooklyn, how close I was to failing.

I SPENT THAT spring more in the music room than the library again, until, as the days began to lengthen, Louisa and Experience fell into a bitter disagreement.

A dean had suggested to the two of them that perhaps they should sing spirituals, that they should add these songs to their repertoire and then make a show of performing them.

Louisa and Experience had already brought in a little money for the fundraising efforts of the school with their singing. The songs they sang were German and Italian pieces—they prided themselves on this. They did not sing hymns, and they did not sing the songs we knew from church, or those our parents and grandparents and lost ones sang to keep from crying. The songs we’d all once sung in the fields. The songs that our parents sang at night or with one another, that we still sang now, even in freedom. No, in public, Louisa and Experience only sang in a foreign tongue, about springtime and love and offering apples to your beloved. But the college suggested they could raise more money if they sang the slave songs.

“There’s that college out in Tennessee that’s done it,” Louisa said, worrying the cloth of her skirt. “And they’ve sung to the Queen of England.”

Indeed, we’d heard of those singers and even tried to see them when it was reported that they were playing in Cincinnati. We’d even started out to make the long journey to hear them, but we’d turned around after half a day when the stationmaster told us it was not the real Jubilee Singers but a fraudulent group—four men and a girl who couldn’t harmonize and made a mockery of not knowing the words.

“The group from Tennessee sang pain for the Queen,” Experience said, in that strange hollow way she had, and this stopped both me and Louisa from speaking further as we tried to understand what she meant.

“They say the Queen gave them an ovation,” Louisa countered. “She invited them to her palace, and they dined with lords and ladies.” Even when she was impassioned, Louisa made everything she was saying sound like a joke, so I laughed at this.

But Experience shook her head. “I won’t sing my sorrow for anyone,” she said.

And then she blew her pitch pipe, to bring Louisa back to the music.

“She’s stubborn, is all,” Louisa explained to me, later. “She’s thinking of herself and not of what can be done with what we have.”

She took my arm in hers. We were crossing the square of dirt. The college president spoke to us all the time of the grass to go there—bright and healthy and cut short and orderly. Every Sunday sermon ended with his invocation of this future time, when the college and the men and women there would be so prosperous, so abundant, they would have a whole mess of earth that grew grass solely for strolling in, which no animal would eat from.

In the meantime, a few of the women students had sprinkled sunflower seeds around the grounds the previous summer, and now, in the spring, we could see the battered stalks poking up still here and there through the muddy snow.

“She’s not thinking of all that singing could do for us,” Louisa said, kicking at the flower roots.

“That’s what you would do if the Queen said she’d give you a stack of coins to sing your pain?”

I was teasing, but Louisa stopped and looked at me gravely—one of the few times I ever saw her stop joking.

“Before I came here, I slept in the corncrib and I saw my mother and brothers sold. I sang for each one when they left me, but that’s my own song, and I wouldn’t sing it for a queen of anything. But this is the only home I have had or will ever have on this Earth. You can’t just throw away a home. You do whatever you can to keep it.” And then she took my arm again and walked me the rest of the road to the Gradys’.

There was a coldness between Louisa and Experience after that, and I saw them once, from afar, Experience loping a few feet in front of Louisa across the field, Louisa trotting to keep up. They sang together, but had stopped speaking, and it was awful to feel the silence returning, the silence coming back in, and I tried to think of something to make it stop.

I was not sure how to convince Experience. I knew my own mother didn’t sing those songs. Her father did not pass them on to her. I only learned them from the women at the LIS, who sang them before, during, and after each meeting, who sang them to keep time as we did some tedious task, like piecing together the stitching in a quilt or rolling bandages. Sometimes, I sang the songs to myself with the words changed, to help me remember all the parts of a body—the names of bones and muscles and organs. I took a certain satisfaction in fitting those phrases into the loop of songs, the songs of work, the songs that made an art out of burden. But to say that to either Louisa or Experience, I knew, was a kind of insult.

IT WAS A few weeks later when the women’s dean, Alma Curtis, asked to meet with me. She tapped on my shoulder as I sat and ate in the whispered companionability of the dining hall.

“Stay behind, Miss Sampson, if you will.”

Alma Curtis was a broad-shouldered woman of forty-five or fifty—back then, I thought of her as old. She was the only married woman who taught at the college. Just the year before, before I had come, she had married the college president, Thomas Curtis. After they had said their vows in the campus chapel and pressed their hands in front of the minister, Alma Curtis had dropped to one knee and bent her head, and requested, in front of the entire college, her husband’s permission to continue her career. And President Curtis had raised her up, cupped his hands underneath her elbows, standing her steady, and said, “Of course.”

Louisa and Experience had repeated this story often—it was always whispered when Alma Curtis walked by.

I had asked, “But how long did he wait to say yes?”

Louisa had blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Did he agree right away? Or did he make her wait?” I thought of a long silence in the hall, Alma Curtis holding her breath while her husband decided her fate, the flowers on the wedding bower shivering around them. And then I laughed. “It sure was clever of her, to ask for permission in front of a crowd like that.”

I had meant it in an admiring way. I had thought, What a slick woman! in the same way that, back home, Lenore applauded the barn cats when one of them swiped the biggest fish head.

But Louisa had looked at me coolly. “What a cynic you are,” she had said. “I happen to find it romantic.”