I was too cowed to say anything to our visitors. With the other people who came to see Mama at the house—her patients, and the runners from the pharmacy closer to town, and all the women in the committees and societies and church groups Mama headed—I had been trained to make polite conversation and ask, “How do you do?” But Madame Elizabeth was different. She spoke to Mama as if we had not all just seen her raise a man from the dead. As if Mama was the same as she.
“Cathy,” she said when Mama stood over Lenore as she made up Mr. Ben’s cot, “you work this poor woman to death.”
As they talked, I did not dare to interrupt them. I did not want to be sent away to bed. Mama brewed strong sassafras tea for both of them—they had seemed to agree, without ever speaking it aloud, that they would both stay up the night to make sure Mr. Ben made it. I sat very still and close to Mama, and the only way I was sure she had not forgotten me was when, after she finished her mug, she silently handed it to me, because she knew that I believed that the sweetest drink in the world came from the dregs of a cup she had drunk from.
From their talking, I learned that Madame Elizabeth was a childhood friend of Mama’s. She had a husband, whom she called Monsieur Pierre. “A Haitian Negro, so you know he’s unruly,” Madame Elizabeth said, and Mama laughed.
“Oh hush,” she said.
He and Madame Elizabeth owned a storefront down in Philadelphia—Madame Elizabeth ran a dressmaker’s shop on one side of the house, and Monsieur Pierre ran an undertaker’s on the other.
“You are doing well?” Mama asked, and Madame Elizabeth stood up, stamping her feet so her skirt hung down straight.
“Well? Well? Look at this dress, Madame Doctor.” She turned. It was, indeed, a very fine dress. The lilies embroidered on the bodice stretched tendrils down to the skirt—a queer embellishment on a mourning dress that she had clearly worn over many travels.
“You play too much,” Mama said. “A dress like that draws attention, and that’s the last thing any of us need.”
“We’re doing the Lord’s work in a cruel world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it with style,” Madame Elizabeth said.
Mama looked at the fire. “If we are found out because you insist on introducing yourself with an ostrich feather, I don’t know that I, or the Lord, can forgive you.”
“Well, ostrich feathers are déclassé.” Madame Elizabeth took the hem of her dress in her hand and artfully shook it. “Pierre always hated them, and lo and behold, the ladies say they’re no longer in fashion. So nothing to worry about on that account.”
They fell into a practiced quarrel, one that must have been older than me, centered on Mama’s bad dress sense. Mama did not care for beauty; this was true. Like all the women in our town, she dressed for work—in heavy dark-colored gowns that could bear the mark of other people’s sweat and tears and spit and vomit, and never show the stain. But where others took care to tie a scarf at an angle or thread sweetgrass through a shirt cuff, Mama did not care. She was not scraggly. She was always neat, and on Sundays she allowed for the vanity of a hat with a big sweeping brim, which was decorated with the same set of silk flowers she’d won in a church raffle before I was born. But when one of the ladies’ groups she belonged to would occasionally fall into giddy talk about the newest bolt of fabric or a new way of tying a head scarf, she would always quickly steer the conversation back to what was at hand. She would have been mortified to know it, but I had heard some of the women point to those same silk flowers on her hat that had not changed position for many seasons and call them “more reliable than springtime.”
Madame Elizabeth teased Mama about the cramped practicalities of their youth until finally she turned to me, the first she had acknowledged me since she came in.
“Do you think she was always this way?” She glanced sideways at my mother.
“You turn my own daughter against me?” Mama said, but she was laughing, really laughing, in a way I had not heard before.
“When we were girls at the Colored School”—Madame Elizabeth leaned in, her voice low, as if I was as old as she and Mama—“I used to be so terrible at arithmetic. But not her. She was the best at it. Oh, so quick! You’d think the devil was giving her notes.”
“Elizabeth!”
“But he wasn’t of course. She was just so smart, your mother. Smarter than the devil, but good. But not all the way good. Can I tell you? Can I tell you a secret, my dear?”
“Don’t listen to her.” Mama went to cover my ears, but Madame Elizabeth drew me to her and held me close to her lap, and mock whispered, loud enough for Mama to hear: “Do you know what your clever mama would do? She’d ask me to dye her ribbons purple for her. Yes, even your good and smart mama wanted a bit of purple ribbon. And me, being her bestest friend, being her kind Elizabeth, mashed up all the blackberries I could find and dyed those ribbons the prettiest purple anyone in Kings County had ever seen.”
“And extorted me and forced me to agree to do your arithmetic for you in exchange,” Mama said.
“But can you blame me?” Madame Elizabeth’s breath was so soft on my ear I shivered. “Your mama has always been the brightest.”
Madame Elizabeth stroked the plaits in my hair and ran her fingers over my brow. “Lord,” she said, “your girl may be dark, Cathy, but isn’t she pretty.”
“Libertie is beautiful,” Mama said, gazing happily at me,
