There was a moment of silence as the women turned the idea around, and Mama, very carefully would not look at Miss Hannah, who was crying now. But Miss Annie, Miss Clara, and Miss Dinah nodded, and it was decided then that this was what their efforts would go toward. A hospital, for whoever made it out alive, to become whole again.

It was hard planning, oftentimes hours of talking with no clear answers. But when the women got going, the whole room began to vibrate. Sometimes, it seemed that the white walls themselves flushed when the women raised their voices. How strange it was to sit around them, at their feet or in the corner, and hear them shout, these same women who all week long told me and the other colored girls in town to speak softly, to keep our heads down and our backs straight, to train our eyes to overlook the insults the world outside of town heaped at our feet. Those women told girls like me to ignore the present-day horrors around us, to look only toward the future, toward another place that did not exist yet.

But here, in the room, I could imagine that I was already there. The women would begin the meeting sitting upright, but by the end, they would be sprawled. Leaning against seats, arms crossed over stools, sipping water, laughing, shouting back and forth.

You knew a meeting was getting work done when Miss Dinah began her sharp, piercing giggle. It was uncontrollable, a little hysterical, and did not necessarily prompt the other women to join in. It was more like the whistle of a teakettle; it told you pressure was high, waters were rolling to a boil, that something was happening, and that whatever it was, it was as wondrous and yet as deceptively common as water transforming into air.

I have never in my life felt anything as powerful as whatever force was in that room while those women talked, and I began to believe that it was the talking itself that did it, that perhaps women’s voices in harmony were like some sort of flintstone sparking, or like the hot burst of air that comes through a window, billowing the curtains, before rain. Sometimes, I imagined the whole room lifting up from their talk—lifting up and spinning out, out, into the future times to come, when everyone would be truly free. The time I thought we were all planning for.

To bring them back down, when a workday was done, they would turn to some sort of amusement. It had to be something calming, something sober. “We need to rest a little in order to keep going,” was what Miss Annie always said.