“Why? What’s the matter with him?” I said, alarmed.

“He is very brilliant,” Experience said hesitantly.

“Yes, very learned,” Louisa said.

“And why should that cause you to feel sorry for him?” I said.

They looked at each other, and then they gave me the same pitying look.

“Well, you have seen his wife?”

“Yes, you have seen his wife?”

“Yes,” I said slowly. I did not want to hear all the unkind things I’d thought of Madeline Grady said aloud by these two girls.

But they were subtler than me. “It’s a study of what can happen when you do not let pure romantic love lead you,” Experience said.

“When lust takes over,” Louisa said theatrically.

Then they both laughed. I smiled, as well. I wished, perhaps, they were joking.

“Madeline Grady was a laundress when they met,” Experience said.

“Well, that’s respectable.”

“Yes, but she was not just a laundress. She sold beer and spirits from her home.”

“That’s how her first husband died,” Louisa said. “The father of her two boys. He mistook a barrel of lime for beer one night and drank a whole draught before he realized, and then he died in agony.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“And then, she went to see Grady, to help her claim her husband’s pension, and in a matter of course, the two have their little girl, and are married right before she was delivered.”

“And Grady, the best colored legal mind of his generation is interrupted before he even gets a chance to leave here.”

“She has thrift and grift to support him,” Louisa said. “She’s got the constitution for it.”

“Yes,” Experience said. “Those shoulders.” And they both glanced at my own, as if judging how broad they were, to see if they were as broad as Madeline Grady’s.

“But it really is a study in what can go wrong when a brilliant colored man makes the wrong choice for a wife,” Louisa said.

In the women’s dining room at Cunningham College, there was a big panel of fabric, with green velvet leaves bordering a list stitched out in red thread, three meters high.

MAN IS STRONG—WOMAN, BEAUTIFUL

MAN IS DARING AND CONFIDENT—WOMAN, DEFERENT AND UNASSUMING

MAN IS GREAT IN ACTION—WOMAN, IN SUFFERING

MAN SHINES ABROAD—WOMAN, AT HOME

MAN TALKS TO CONVINCE—WOMAN, TO PERSUADE AND PLEASE

MAN HAS A RUGGED HEART—WOMAN, A SOFT AND TENDER ONE

MAN PREVENTS MISERY—WOMAN, RELIEVES IT

MAN HAS SCIENCE—WOMAN, TASTE

MAN HAS JUDGMENT—WOMAN, SENSIBILITY

MAN IS A BEING OF JUSTICE—WOMAN, AN ANGEL OF MERCY

The first time I read it, I thought, Then what is a man? I thought of my mother, of course, and myself. I tried to parcel out where she lay on the fabric, but she was somewhere in between. Men then, for me, were still too terrifying to contemplate directly. They were an abstract. The only man I had seen up close was Mr. Ben, and he was not described by any of the words on that quilt. The left side of the quilt may as well have been stitched in gold thread; that was how fanciful a man’s character was to me. And I had never known anyone who would claim Mama had taste and not science, who would call her deferent and unassuming.