“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.”

I felt my face go hot with anger again. “I am not surprised by the cruelty, Mama,” I said. “I am surprised we are expected to ignore it, to never mention it, to swim in it as if it’s the oily, smelly harbor water the boys dive into by the wharves.”

Mama finally took off her bonnet and set it down. She turned to me, her eyes exacting. “You want to write poetry?” she said. “Or do you want to get things done?”

“I want a clean pool to swim in.”

She snorted. “Always with the flowery talk. You’re spoiled.”

“Call me spoiled,” I said. “I won’t rot if I swim in clean water, though.”