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.”

And Mama, my brave mama, did not come to my aid. She only narrowed her eyes slightly, and then she said, “Come take notes, Libertie,” and she herself went to touch the woman’s middle.

And so I understood. Mama was light enough that the white women did not feel awkward when her hands touched them. Mama, to them, was not all the way black. When the black women they knew outside the hospital touched the white women, they touched them with what they told themselves to be dumb hands. They did not have to imagine those hands as belonging to anyone, least of all someone thinking and feeling. But I’d touched that white woman with a knowing of what was deepest inside her, and she’d recoiled—it was beyond her imagination.