“She’s not thinking of all that singing could do for us,” Louisa said, kicking at the flower roots.

“That’s what you would do if the Queen said she’d give you a stack of coins to sing your pain?”

I was teasing, but Louisa stopped and looked at me gravely—one of the few times I ever saw her stop joking.

“Before I came here, I slept in the corncrib and I saw my mother and brothers sold. I sang for each one when they left me, but that’s my own song, and I wouldn’t sing it for a queen of anything. But this is the only home I have had or will ever have on this Earth. You can’t just throw away a home. You do whatever you can to keep it.” And then she took my arm again and walked me the rest of the road to the Gradys’.

There was a coldness between Louisa and Experience after that, and I saw them once, from afar, Experience loping a few feet in front of Louisa across the field, Louisa trotting to keep up. They sang together, but had stopped speaking, and it was awful to feel the silence returning, the silence coming back in, and I tried to think of something to make it stop.

I was not sure how to convince Experience. I knew my own mother didn’t sing those songs. Her father did not pass them on to her. I only learned them from the women at the LIS, who sang them before, during, and after each meeting, who sang them to keep time as we did some tedious task, like piecing together the stitching in a quilt or rolling bandages. Sometimes, I sang the songs to myself with the words changed, to help me remember all the parts of a body—the names of bones and muscles and organs. I took a certain satisfaction in fitting those phrases into the loop of songs, the songs of work, the songs that made an art out of burden. But to say that to either Louisa or Experience, I knew, was a kind of insult.

It was a few weeks later when the women’s dean, Alma Curtis, asked to meet with me. She tapped on my shoulder as I sat and ate in the whispered companionability of the dining hall.

“Stay behind, Miss Sampson, if you will.”

Alma Curtis was a broad-shouldered woman of forty-five or fifty—back then, I thought of her as old. She was the only married woman who taught at the college. Just the year before, before I had come, she had married the college president, Thomas Curtis. After they had said their vows in the campus chapel and pressed their hands in front of the minister, Alma Curtis had dropped to one knee and bent her head, and requested, in front of the entire college, her husband’s permission to continue her career. And President Curtis had raised her up, cupped his hands underneath her elbows, standing her steady, and said, “Of course.”