Louisa and Experience had already brought in a little money for the fundraising efforts of the school with their singing. The songs they sang were German and Italian pieces—they prided themselves on this. They did not sing hymns, and they did not sing the songs we knew from church, or those our parents and grandparents and lost ones sang to keep from crying. The songs we’d all once sung in the fields. The songs that our parents sang at night or with one another, that we still sang now, even in freedom. No, in public, Louisa and Experience only sang in a foreign tongue, about springtime and love and offering apples to your beloved. But the college suggested they could raise more money if they sang the slave songs.

“There’s that college out in Tennessee that’s done it,” Louisa said, worrying the cloth of her skirt. “And they’ve sung to the Queen of England.”

Indeed, we’d heard of those singers and even tried to see them when it was reported that they were playing in Cincinnati. We’d even started out to make the long journey to hear them, but we’d turned around after half a day when the stationmaster told us it was not the real Jubilee Singers but a fraudulent group—four men and a girl who couldn’t harmonize and made a mockery of not knowing the words.

“The group from Tennessee sang pain for the Queen,” Experience said, in that strange hollow way she had, and this stopped both me and Louisa from speaking further as we tried to understand what she meant.

“They say the Queen gave them an ovation,” Louisa countered. “She invited them to her palace, and they dined with lords and ladies.” Even when she was impassioned, Louisa made everything she was saying sound like a joke, so I laughed at this.

But Experience shook her head. “I won’t sing my sorrow for anyone,” she said.

And then she blew her pitch pipe, to bring Louisa back to the music.

“She’s stubborn, is all,” Louisa explained to me, later. “She’s thinking of herself and not of what can be done with what we have.”

She took my arm in hers. We were crossing the square of dirt. The college president spoke to us all the time of the grass to go there—bright and healthy and cut short and orderly. Every Sunday sermon ended with his invocation of this future time, when the college and the men and women there would be so prosperous, so abundant, they would have a whole mess of earth that grew grass solely for strolling in, which no animal would eat from.

In the meantime, a few of the women students had sprinkled sunflower seeds around the grounds the previous summer, and now, in the spring, we could see the battered stalks poking up still here and there through the muddy snow.