He whistled. “She must’ve liked her niggers black to get a girl like you.”

I had heard worse. It was the refrain of so many when Mama and I walked in the street.

“Mama says I’m like a mulberry.”

“Yeah, you a pretty little girl—no denying it. Just dark. Where your daddy at?”

“He’s dead.”

“So who else live here?”

“It’s just me and Mama—and her nurse, Lenore, who comes every morning to help with the patients.”

He propped himself up on his elbow and winced. “Lord, I’m dizzy.” He contemplated the ceiling for what felt like a long time. Then he looked to the window that was just beginning to turn white with the rising sun. “She own all of this? From doctoring? Just from doctoring?”

“Mama grew up in this house. Her daddy owned it. He was a pig farmer. We still have some of his hogs, but we don’t raise ’em to sell anymore. You don’t know about his hogs?” I warmed to the telling. What a change, what a delight to have a stranger in the house, someone who did not already know everything about me, as was usually the way with Mama’s visitors. “His hogs used to be famous. Grandfather was very religious, and he taught every hog born under his care to bow its head in prayer before it ate at the trough. He’d say the Lord’s Prayer with ’em, Mama says. A few of the pigs here are old enough to still do it. Sometimes …” I leaned forward to share this secret with my new friend. “Sometimes, I say the Lord’s Prayer really loud when I’m feeding ’em to see which ones will bow. But they don’t listen to me like that.”

This confidence was lost on Mr. Ben, though, because he wasn’t paying attention. He was looking up, over my shoulder, and I turned to see that he was looking at Mama, who had stirred in her chair, and who was watching Mr. Ben back.

“That’s enough, Libertie.”

She stood up and stood over Mr. Ben. On her face now was a familiar expression, one I had seen often enough in the examination room, and when I accompanied her on her house calls.

When Mama was diagnosing someone, when she was calculating how best to heal them, she got this look. Her eyes emptied out and turned dark, and her brow went completely smooth, and she stared for a good three or four minutes. She did not respond to anything—not a patient’s babbling, not the sound of the wind at the door, not the distraught mother saying, “Please, please, please,” not the cries of the baby who was too young to understand the failings of its own small body. Certainly not to me, the girl at her side holding her bag, watching her disappear from me and go deep into her mind, where the right answer nearly always was. She’d leave me behind, leave us all behind, to commune with the perfection of her intellect. And when she returned, it was with a resolve that was almost frightening to see.

It was sad and cold to be outside her caring. It had scared me as a smaller child, made me cry.

As consolation, Mama had explained that one day I would join her when she left for her mind like that, that one day I would be a doctor, too, standing beside her, both our minds flying free while our bodies did the work. And we’d have a horse and carriage, and a sign with gold letters on it that said DR. SAMPSON AND DAUGHTER. “Wouldn’t that be nice, Libertie?” she’d said.

And that had been a kind of hollow comfort when she left me behind for her calculations.

Mr. Ben was watching her now. “It feels like I’m dying. Am I gonna die?”

Mama’s eyes filled up again, and she was back. “Not yet,” she said.

He propped himself up on his elbows. “This the worst pain I ever felt. I was whupped till my back was ribbons when I was a younger man, and I thought that was dying, but this is different. It feels like there’s a hole in me, in the very center of me, and the wind’s running through it.”

Mama sat back. “That’s a problem of the spirit.”

“So medicine women are supposed to fix that.”

“I’m a trained doctor,” Mama said, straightening up. “I fix the body. The spirit can tell me what’s wrong with the body sometimes. But what you are describing—you can talk to Reverend Harland at the church about the spirit.”

“Seems you should be able to do it all.”

I did not think, then, that Mama was even listening. If she had heard it, I was sure she had discounted it, because all she said was, “You will stay here to rest.”

The next morning, it took Mama and Madame Elizabeth and Lucien, struggling, to lift the empty coffin back onto the wagon bed it was so unwieldly. Finally, they slid it home.

Madame Elizabeth was just taking up the whip to prod the mule when Mama seized her friend’s hand and kissed the knuckles where they wrapped around the switch.

Madame Elizabeth looked startled. Lucien smirked—oh, how I hated him for that.

For Mama looked genuinely pained. “If you should run into any trouble—”

“We won’t,” Madame Elizabeth said.

“But if you should …” She held her friend’s hand for a beat more, then flung it away from her. “Be safe.”

Mr. Ben had come outside for this last bit. He bent his head slightly in the wagon’s direction. “Thanks, mamselle,” he said with slight mockery, to which Madame Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

Then she called to the mule, and they were on their way.

Mama stayed to watch them go. Mr. Ben stood beside her.

“Y’all ain’t afraid of getting caught?” he said.

“She’s very good at what she does.”

Mr. Ben sniffed. “When she’s not trying to murder a man.”

Mama glanced at me, then looked back to the road, where the wagon moved slowly away from us. “You made it here well enough.”

“Back in Maryland,” Mr. Ben said, “where I was before …” He looked down at his hands. “Before I was sold the first time, there was a group of niggers like you gals. They did what you doing. They got fifteen out. And then they was caught. You don’t want to hear what happened.”

Mama glanced again at me, then back at Mr. Ben. “We most certainly do not,” she said.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Blood—”

“That’s enough,” Mama said. “Mr. Ben, if you’re well enough to stand and well enough to talk, do you think you’re well enough to help us today?”

He sniffed again. “I suppose so.”

“Good,” Mama said. “The best way to help is to stay quiet and stay out of the way, then. Don’t let anybody who comes to the house see you yet.”

“Your neighbors don’t know you in this business? Mamselle Elizabeth told me she was bringing me to an all-colored town.”

“We are,” Mama said. “You’ll settle well here. But it’s best if we allow people to truthfully say they thought you came here on your own. Generally, we take care of each other here. But I don’t want to put anyone into a position of lying for us. It’s too dangerous. Besides, you know as well as I do, Mr. Ben. Even with our own, you can’t trust everybody.”

He looked out over the yard again, to the barn and the squat crab-apple tree, to the hog pen with the two pigs just now rising from the mud to wander, to Mama’s medicine garden and the small field that lay just beyond it, where we grew the vegetables for the kitchen, to all the things that I’d just told him she owned.

“I suppose that’s right,” he said. “Just because a person’s a nigger doesn’t mean they know the life you do.” Then he looked at Mama and stalked back into the house.

I slipped my hand into hers.

“What does he mean, Mama?”

“He has just suffered a great shock to his system and won’t make much sense for a while.”

“Because you and Madame Elizabeth got him free?”

She took her hand out of mine and knelt so that we could look each other in the eye. I did not like this at all. I preferred looking up at her, tilting my head back till all I saw was her chin. Eye to eye was more frightening.

People said Mama was a beautiful woman, but I think what they really meant was she was light enough to pass. She had large eyes, true, set deep in her skull, but they were more owl-like than anything else. She had a heavy brow, hooded, that made it look as though she was about to scowl, even when she was laughing. Her skin, of course, was pale but it was sallow. It was her one vanity, the only one she allowed me to witness anyways—she dried lily petals in the spring and ate them year-round, to make the tone of her cheeks even. It was, up until this moment, my favorite secret we shared between us. I was the only one who saw her do it. Her nose was straight—I think this is what people meant when they called her beautiful—but it was severe. Her lips were the only pretty thing about her, the same as mine, full and always resolving themselves into the shape of a rose. When I looked at her, I never saw my own face, and maybe that is why I found it so disturbing, these times when she’d kneel down to look me in the eye.

I preferred, at that age, to think of us as the same person. I was still young enough for that.

She looked me in the eye and said, “What did you say?”

“You got him free. You and Madame Elizabeth. You got him here to be free.”