And then she threw my hand away, and the silence rose up between us again, as inevitable and heavy as an ocean’s wave.

Dear Mama,

The train was tolerable. The stagecoach was not. I had to sit on the top, at the back, because at first I was the only Negro traveling and there was a white family, moving to Ohio. The wife did not want me to sit beside her or her children. But after the first stop, a Negro man and his son joined me. The man was named Mr. Jonathan, and he taught me how to press my body forward into the wind. He said it was the best way to endure the ride. He told me I have a habit of looking back over my shoulder at the road behind us, and that is no good when you are traveling through open country.

The land here is strange. I find it all too flat. Not like the hills in Kings County. The air, though—that, I can concede, is better. The first few days out of New York, my nose dripped a thin black liquid that made the coachman laugh. He told me it was all the soot of the city, fleeing my nostrils. I must confess, I bunched my cloak into the balls of my hands and rubbed my nose at his rudeness.

The stagecoach left me in a town called Butterfield, and the college is five miles farther than that. There was one cart waiting to make a mill run, luckily, that agreed to take us—otherwise I would have walked the five miles, pulling the twenty pounds of clothing and quilts and books in my trunk behind me.

On the ride into school, I sat beside two other girls, one plump, one stout, both with skin the color of damp sand. The thin one leaned in to all three of us and said, “At night, you can’t see nothing in these fields. You, for instance, out in those fields you’d be nothing but eyes and teeth.”

I knew it was a joke, but when I heard it, it shot through me and I spent the rest of the ride turning suddenly, trying to catch, out of the corner of my eye, glimmers of teeth and eyes from the fields. Or maybe just another girl as dark as me who folded down into molars and corneas as soon as the sun set.

I will stop myself from speculating further. I know you do not like poetry. I will write another letter to you when I’ve gathered enough facts, not just impressions, for your liking.

Your

Libertie

I had resolved to wash her influence off me like dust from the road. But everything in that place she’d banished me to looked to me exactly like Mama. The gray sky that arched above me was the same color as her front tooth, and the fields smelled like the inside of her shawl, and the wind in the trees, I thought, sounded just like the whisper of her voice when she was being urgent.