The cart stopped a quarter of a mile before it reached campus, in front of a wide, low log cabin, set back a little, with a short, rough-hewn fence in the front.

As I headed up the path in the dusk, my trunk trailing behind me, the door opened. A woman stood there. When I reached her, I realized she was shorter than me—the top of her kerchief only came up to my shoulder. She was almost as dark as me, too. She looked up at me, laughed at my dirt-smeared face. “You look like you walked here from Brooklyn,” she said.

She came out behind me and pushed me inside. “Leave the trunk,” she said. “One of the boys will get it.”

This was where I was to board—the home of an old friend of Mama’s, Franklin Grady. He was from Kings County, too, and had moved out west to study law at Cunningham College, run for over twenty years by abolitionists, an experiment in Negro education. The woman who greeted me was Grady’s wife, Madeline.

Grady had been there since before the war, since the days of spiriting away, and now that war was over and there were so many ways for a Negro to get ahead, he had chosen to stay at the college, to become its first Negro dean of law. Indeed, as Mama had told me, all the teachers were Negroes—drawn out to these fields to grow the teachers and doctors and farmers and lawyers our race would need in freedom.

I realized that Mama had sent me to a place that was the antithesis of her hospital. There would be no white students behind a velvet curtain in the classrooms of Cunningham College, claiming reconciliation. But Mama also knew, as did I, that I couldn’t get away with the trick she’d pulled so many years ago—register at a white medical school and be taken for merely a white woman, not a colored one, until first semester marks came through.

The Grady household was not like mine. There were three rooms—the big front one, with the hearth, the back room, where Grady, Madeline, and the three children slept, and then a smaller room, where Mr. Grady’s books were kept and where he went to work on the cases that came his way. The main room was hot. Hanging from the ceiling, draped over every beam and surface, were skirts and shirts and pants. Enough clothing for a regiment. “Keep looking,” Madeline Grady said as I craned my neck up to stare at the ceiling beams through the leg hole of a pair of bloomers. “They’ll be here till Wednesday.”

Then she moved off, out the door to the yard, where more clothing hung out to dry.