This, she thought, her ears filled with children’s voices, is where I live. More than ever, she longed for a child of her own. She could take her to the beach, raise her on the soothing rush of the surf. Teach her, love her, continue herself into another age.

When she dismissed the class, she realized he had been watching from the open doorway.

He stood in the hallway in his creased gray suit, Ivanhoe Grant, grinning his sweet grin, and she stood inside the sun-washed classroom, the children filing out rambunctiously between them, their little shoes clunking and scuffing across the scrubbed wooden floor.

Then the children were gone, and the classroom was empty. For her, there was always a sadness about an empty classroom at the end of the school day. The ghosts of voices lingered in the air, dusty with chalk. The desks sat in neat, useless rows.

Next month, next year, a dozen years into adulthood, maybe, some of them—one of them?—would remember her voice, the lesson it had carried that day, the pulse of her imagination and reason. If she were lucky, it would make a difference. Probably, she would never know. Every small lesson was an act of faith.

Into the quiet classroom strode Ivanhoe Grant. “Suffer the little children,” he said, and smiled. His eyes were warm and glowing. She wondered how he could make them go warm and cold like that.

“Reverend Grant. Shouldn’t you be out saving souls instead of haunting the schoolhouse?”

He stood right up close to her and laid his fine hands on her shoulders. She shuddered, feeling his electricity, but she could not pull out from under his hands. He stood so tall that she was looking straight into his black silk tie. He smelled musky and clean at the same time. She had never been touched like this by a Negro man before. Why didn’t she balk?

“Salvation does not come to committees,” he said. “Every man must go to the mountain alone.”

“And every woman?”

“Especially every woman. Here beginneth the lesson.” He let his hands fall from her shoulders but grabbed her elbow in a firm, gentle grip, coaxing her toward the door.

“Where are we going?”

“This lesson will cost you a nickel—have you got a nickel?”

She kept a purse in the bottom of the large cloth bag she carried her schoolbooks in. She broke away from him and went to the bottom drawer of her desk to get it. He waited. She was outside herself, looking in, marveling that she was about to go off with this man, this black stranger, without a word of warning, explanation, or persuasion. He hadn’t even asked her permission to take her—where? She could—she should—say no. But something had gotten into her, a combination of the unseasonable heat, his audacity and sweet voice, her own stubbornness. She followed him out, and they boarded the crosstown streetcar at the corner of Seventh. He didn’t touch her again until they stepped off the streetcar in Brooklyn.