After that, I noticed how the white-woman patients watched me while I assisted Mama. They stared at where my dress tightened on my chest, at the roundness of my arms, at where my skirt darted at my hips—stared openly, because they knew I would not rebuke them—and then they would sigh, exasperated, and look away.

The older ones, I could understand their jealousy—the jealousy of age for youth, I thought it was. Dried up corncobs, I wrote of them in my never-ending letter to the woman in the water. But the patients about my age, I did not understand. I had grown up free, only around colored people, and I could not fathom their scrutiny.

And Mama chose them over me, every time.

When the women flinched, when they scowled at my body, Mama ignored them. Sometimes, she said, “Come stand here, Libertie,” so that I was out of their eyesight. But Mama, dear Mama, my fierce Mama, never told them to stop.

Mama acted as though the white women’s pain was the same as ours. As if when they cried, they grieved for the same things lost that we did. Mama did not seem to mind that a woman who came to our waiting room and sat on the other side of the velvet curtain could not be comfortable. Even when she came at her most vulnerable, when she had to be vigilant for some sort of abuse, she had to stare at that velvet curtain and wonder if on the other side of it was the very white woman who had caused her pain to begin with.

How, when the world was splitting wide open for colored women, could Mama choose to yoke herself to the very white ones who often were trying to sew it all up for us? “There’s prudence and practicality, and then there is a complete failure of imagination,” Miss Annie said shortly after Mama took colored off her sign, and that was all any self-respecting member of the LIS allowed themselves to say in front of me.

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.