She made her way to us, where we stood, glanced at me.

“The girl up?”

“I woke up before anyone,” I said proudly.

Lenore gave Mama a look.

“I told her,” Mama said. “She says she can keep a secret.”

“She a child,” Lenore said.

“I can do it,” I said again.

Lenore looked steadily at my mother, and my mother looked back for a bit, then lowered her eyes.

“It’s not safe for the baby to be up,” Lenore said.

“I’m not a baby,” I insisted.

Lenore sighed. “Grown folks know when to keep quiet. Babies run they mouths every which way. Y’all can’t help it.” Her voice was drained of malice. She was merely stating a fact. This wounded my pride even more. Worse, she was not even looking at me when she said it; she was looking at Mama.

“Dr. Sampson, I won’t get sold to a slavecatcher because a child can’t stop talking.”

“Nobody’s saying that’s going to happen,” Mama said.

“Still”—Lenore moved past her, to the house, to start the fire burning for the day—“you can’t trust babies with the ways of the world.”

We were alone together again.

“I am not a baby, Mama.”

She looked at me skeptically.

“I can help. I can do what you do. Let me help.”

“You cannot, Libertie.”

“Mama,” I said, “you always say that when I am big, you and I will have a horse and carriage together, with ‘Dr. Sampson and Daughter’ written in gold on the side. You promised me, when I am big. You said that. You did. So let me help you now.”

She sighed.

“I am eleven, nearly twelve in July. Let me do it, too, Mama.”

She was not looking at me anymore, but at the dusty road that Madame Elizabeth had left on and Lenore had returned to us on. “I suppose it was inevitable,” she said.

“What does ‘inevitable’ mean?”

“If you’re to join us in this work, Libertie, the first lesson is the one Lenore said. Don’t ask so many questions. Only listen and learn.”

This lesson did not appear to apply to Mr. Ben.

The whole day, all he did was question.

“What’s that you’ve got going there, Miss Doctor?”

“Lord, why does the house smell like greens gone bad?”

“Y’all don’t stop at noon to eat?”

“But I still don’t understand who pays you for all this work, because you know niggers ain’t got no money.”

Mama tried, politely, to answer his questions at first while Lenore flat-out ignored him from the start. It was not so bad in the morning, before patients, and before John Culver, the pharmacist’s son, came running for more supplies. Usually, in those hours, Mama and Lenore worked in a silent dance, the only sound being the fire crackling and the glass tops of the medicine jars shifting as they reached for this or that to make or measure.