“But you know Reverend Harland,” I said. “He just refuses to respond to any of Mama’s hints about unseemliness.”

I blushed then, unsure if I had offended Grady with my irreverence.

He said nothing, only picked up the pamphlet carefully and carried it back to the room the rest of the family respected as his study.

It was to always be like that. He rarely stayed in a room when I entered. At first, I was sure the awkwardness would dissipate. Before I’d left home, the gossips at church had told me that Grady had been my mother’s sweetheart before she met my father. So I was curious to meet him, to see if he could explain her to me, tell me what she had been like when she was young and gay, before she’d become this woman I could not understand. But it was perhaps this past connection that made Grady wary of me.

And so, to learn about him, I was forced to watch his wife.

I could not determine what about her made her the reason Grady had never come back to Kings County but instead had chosen a place with fields full of eyes and teeth. Madeline Grady was nothing like my mother. She liked to gossip and she liked to sing loudly, off-tune. She told me once, sighing, that if she had to spend another night at the college listening to lectures about the Negro condition, she would maybe yawn so wide she’d swallow her own nose.

That first night, she watched me as I put my Bible and my anatomy book—the two books I had managed to pack—under the pillow next to the mess of blankets she’d set up for me by the hearth. “Lord,” she said, fanning the pages with her thumb, “imagine reading all of this. Sometimes I wonder.”

“Oh,” I said, understanding what she meant. And then I decided to be brave. “I could teach you,” I told her shyly.

She shook her head. “I said ‘sometimes,’ girl. Not all the time.” She laughed. “Grady reads enough for both of us.”

I lay on the cooling hearthstones and wondered. Just that night, before we all retired to bed, Grady had read from their family Bible and Mrs. Grady had sat beside him, a child on her knee, patting in time to the cadence of the words. But she does not wish to read them for herself? I thought. It was even more strange to me because at the college, though I had yet to meet them, I knew there were women who had scrimped and saved and walked a thousand miles to be able to read a book. There were women Madeline Grady’s age who stayed up late each night to learn the alphabet. And here she slept beside a man who not only read books but wrote them. And she’d never rolled over in bed and said, “Teach me.”