I wanted to nurse those sick. But when I tried, the camp doctor complained to the superintendent and I was ordered to stop. I visited the doctor to see if I could work with him but he already had a nurse. He treated me coldly. He was from Ohio, and by his lights, I was ignorant. But as I left the office, he called after me and said, “There’s a nigger doctor at Annadel who doesn’t have a nurse. Wouldn’t be a pleasant job, would it? But if you’re really interested…”

We worked a garden patch the company made available, but it was only half an acre, and would yield nothing for months anyway. For many weeks we ate nothing but potatoes fried with a bit of onion and bacon grease, and that only once a day. Twice a week I dipped into our precious store of meal and baked cornbread. I took dizzy spells.

I thought of writing to Ben, but I knew that their abundance of food would do us no good, and they had little cash to spare. Besides, it would have hurt Albion to know I begged from my kin.

One night I sat on the porch and watched men work the row of coke ovens built into the mountainside below the tipple. The ovens glowed and steamed in the dark. Tiny black figures leaped and darted before the fiery pits. I knew they were mostly Negroes who worked the coke ovens, who bore the heat and breathed the noxious fumes which caused my nose to curl even at that distance. They shovelled and danced like demons at the gates of Hell.

When Albion came down the alley, banging his empty dinner pail against his leg, I met him at the gate.

“Would you mind ifn I worked for a Negro doctor?” I asked.

“I wouldnt care.”

“They’s some folks would look down on a white woman for it. Would you mind?”

“I wouldnt care.”

“We need the money.”

“Course we do. Hit would be a blessing.”

Doctor Toussaint Booker took me on and paid two dollars a day, a fortune. I studied the frayed cuffs of his one suit and wondered if he could afford it, but I never asked him about it. We were no longer in the destitute class, but could now be considered fortunate. After I went to work we ate meat four days a week, enjoyed fatback in our beans, and Albion set aside fifty cents each day to give to miners with sick children. I looked back with a certain pride on the six months we lived on Albion’s seventy-five cents a day. I had accounted for every single penny and every piece of scrip, and spent nary a one without thinking of ten things it might be used for and pledging to do without the nine least important. Yes, there was a pride in it now that we were a bit better off. Only those who can afford it take pride in such things, and only when looking back on them.