The Ladies’ Intelligence Society told Mama they could not raise the money solely for her hospital, in the way that they could during the war. And certainly not solely for a hospital just for colored women, when colored men were back and needed healing more. “We do not like it,” Miss Annie said, “but we think people will be more amenable to your cause if we raise money for you and other things.”

Mama did not even bat an eye. She only nodded, once, and said, “Well, then.”

And so Mama decided to change the hospital name. “It’s a sign of the reconciliation, of the harmony of the times we now live in,” Mama said to me and Lenore as we stood beside her, looking up at the boy on his ladder in the street. “Here it is, only two years after the end of the war, and white women will sit side by side colored women in our hospital waiting room, willing to be treated because they know, deep down, their organs are the same.”

But I knew, and she knew, this was not true. Because after the boy came down off his ladder, she had him put a rod up on the waiting room ceiling, and then she instructed Lenore to hang a scrap of red velvet on it, to make a little curtain, so that the new patients she admitted, the white women, could pull the curtain shut and avoid the sight of colored women beside them.

The white women came because Mama was colored but not too colored. In fact, her color worked in her favor. She would never be invited to a dinner party, or a lecture, or sit across from them in a private club. They would never run into her in their worlds and be reminded of their most embarrassing ailments: a stubborn and treacherous womb, smelly fluids, bodies insisting on being rude and offensive. Mama could restore these women’s bodies back to what they wished them to be, make them well enough to join this world again—and they would never encounter her in their real lives, this woman who knew exactly what was beneath their skirts.

The first time I touched one of these new white-woman patients, she flinched. I remember, she was only a few years older than me, a young bride who’d come in with thrush between her legs, too embarrassed to see her own doctor and be found out. Found out of what? I wrote to my woman in the water.

I grasped the white woman’s elbow to help her to the examination table, which she did not mind, and then I began to feel at her middle, as Mama had instructed at the start of the appointment, and she batted my hands away. “Off me,” she said. And when Mama looked up, from where she was standing in the corner, preparing for the examination, the woman said, “Your girl is molesting me.”