Your father did not talk of his life before he was free. He would not tell me even what town he ran from, only that he had lived for a spell in Maryland, and for some time in Virginia. Who his people were—his mother, his father, his sisters and brothers—he would not tell me, and in the flush of love I did not press him. I saw how asking made his eyes sad. Besides, I told myself, our life together shared a different fate. He had found me, with my bright skin and farm and money and profession, and he would be safe always, because I loved him. That’s how young I was then. I really believed that.

After your father died, Elizabeth’s letters told me of the women who came to her, the front of their dresses wet with milk, their daughters snatched from their hands, and I feared that would be me. It would be me. You would be taken from me, and it did not matter that I was freeborn, and it did not matter that I could see the blue veins at my wrist. None of that would keep you safe. That’s what drove me to give aid. And I decided when you were born that I would hide my heart from you, because I worried I would love you into nervous oblivion.

When you were born, when Lenore raised you up from where she’d placed you on my thigh, the first thing I did was check behind your ears for your true color. And I rejoiced for what I saw there. Because a part of him would live on in the world. That beautiful color. His skin glowed in the sun, like yours did as a girl, as it does now. I could not look at you in your wedding dress—that black black skin against that field of white—because of the glow of it. I had to turn away, you were so overpoweringly beautiful.

When I saw the color behind your ears, I could no longer deny all the ways you could be taken from me.

Even I was not secure, and my papa was not secure, in our color, because we were known to be colored and we could have been taken at any time. And if you were taken from me, no white person would believe you were mine—they did not think it was possible that I would prefer your black skin to my faint yellow, that I could give birth to something as wondrous as you.

The whole world told me you weren’t mine, whenever I held you in my arms outside of our home. And so I grew frightened for you. And I knew what I owed you was very great. I must raise you up to be strong enough for this world. I must teach you how to heal the people in it. Maybe that could save you, I thought. Again, I was still very young then.