There was no drawn-out fight. The women in the group did not argue that way. Instead, one Sunday at church, our pew was empty, except for us. No one gathered around Mama’s seat as soon as the sermon was over, as they had when we were plotting. We were back to the same loneliness we’d lived in after Ben Daisy. Mama had squandered every good feeling those women had ever mustered for her.

I saw Mama raise her hand to Miss Annie, and Miss Annie raise hers back limply and then turn to one of the other women she was talking to. I saw Mama register this, set back her shoulders, turn, and say, “Home, Libertie. I’m too tired for socializing today.”

She gave up co-conspirators for customers, I wrote to my woman.

“What does it feel like?” I asked Mama one Sunday as we walked back home from church.

She looked at me, startled. “What do you mean?”

What does it feel like to lose your friends? is what I wanted to ask, but I knew it was an impossibly cruel question. So I only said, “What does it feel like to heal someone?”

But this, too, was a mistake, because my mother looked ahead and said, “I’ve never thought about it, Libertie. I don’t know that I can answer.”

How could she?

How could she?

It was the rhythm I walked to all the way to our house, up the steps of our porch to the front door.

I stood in the parlor and watched Mama unpin her bonnet until I could not take it anymore. “How can you treat those white women,” I said, “after what you’ve seen them and their husbands do to the people who came to us? They marked our houses for destruction not three years ago, and you welcome them as if it was nothing. All the blood and sweat you mopped up for years, the bones we set right. All the people we lost—”

“You are so young, Libertie,” she said. It infuriated me. “The world is bigger than you think.” She was still watching her reflection in the parlor mirror.

I tried to meet her eyes, but I couldn’t. I looked at the glass jar with her sister’s braids in it, untouched since Ben Daisy—no one brave enough to touch it since he left us.

No, Mama, I wanted to say. The world can live in the palm of my hand. The world is in the burning between the thighs of the colored women who seek you out for comfort. The world is in the wounds on the heads of the fathers, and in the eyes we treated, burnt by smoke from the fires the white mobs set.

I can measure the world. Can you?

But I didn’t have the courage to say that. I lowered my eyes. For a time.

“I’ve raised you wrong,” Mama said to her reflection. “I’ve raised you all wrong if some white folks being cruel is a surprise to you.”