They would all arrange themselves around Ella, who would lead the conversation, usually begun by relating an imagined indignity suffered in the market. The untrustworthiness and the untapped potential of Haitian women was the main topic of conversation. How great the country could be, it was agreed, if only those women understood their place in a chaste home. Instead, they wandered to market and upset the order of the world.

Like Ella, none of these women had been to America for a very long time. The America they described was a kind of dream, where Negro people lived in perfect harmony, with kind and just laws, and every Negro woman stayed home to stitch counterpanes while her husband entered the world. I could not tell if they had been so long gone that they really believed this fantasy to be true, or if it was a collective fiction they engaged in together to pass the time, but to hear it made me wish to scream.

I attempted, once, very early on, to set them right. I told them of the red marks the whites had left on our doors. I said, “There are men following the law right now whom white men string up on trees for exercising their rights.”

There was a pause in the room. One woman covered her mouth. Another murmured, “Mercy.”

Ella did not even look up from the sewing work in her lap. Her hands moved the needle in and out of the fabric, humming like a cicada. “But there is justice in America,” she said. “It will be set right. Here, Negroes cut down other Negroes for politics, too. It is our own against our own. In America, we are not so uncivilized as that.”

I very nearly rushed across the room and ripped the embroidery from her hands. Instead, I stood and left, and I made it a habit to do so every afternoon, when I had sat long enough to be deemed polite. The only thing that saved me was the knowledge that the world my husband was building, that I was sure I would soon join him in building, was bigger than what Ella or those women could possibly imagine. I held this knowledge close to me and it cooled me in the middle of these endless, turgid afternoons, as if I had pressed a wet cloth to the back of my neck.

At some point during each discussion, a woman would excuse herself to go to Bishop Chase’s door, by prearrangement. “I forgot,” she would say, “the bishop asked to see me,” and she would get up, and none of the other women in the room would meet her eye, and Ella, especially, would double down in her viciousness as soon as the woman took her leave.