“Mama grew up in this house. Her daddy owned it. He was a pig farmer. We still have some of his hogs, but we don’t raise ’em to sell anymore. You don’t know about his hogs?” I warmed to the telling. What a change, what a delight to have a stranger in the house, someone who did not already know everything about me, as was usually the way with Mama’s visitors. “His hogs used to be famous. Grandfather was very religious, and he taught every hog born under his care to bow its head in prayer before it ate at the trough. He’d say the Lord’s Prayer with ’em, Mama says. A few of the pigs here are old enough to still do it. Sometimes …” I leaned forward to share this secret with my new friend. “Sometimes, I say the Lord’s Prayer really loud when I’m feeding ’em to see which ones will bow. But they don’t listen to me like that.”
This confidence was lost on Mr. Ben, though, because he wasn’t paying attention. He was looking up, over my shoulder, and I turned to see that he was looking at Mama, who had stirred in her chair, and who was watching Mr. Ben back.
“That’s enough, Libertie.”
She stood up and stood over Mr. Ben. On her face now was a familiar expression, one I had seen often enough in the examination room, and when I accompanied her on her house calls.
When Mama was diagnosing someone, when she was calculating how best to heal them, she got this look. Her eyes emptied out and turned dark, and her brow went completely smooth, and she stared for a good three or four minutes. She did not respond to anything—not a patient’s babbling, not the sound of the wind at the door, not the distraught mother saying, “Please, please, please,” not the cries of the baby who was too young to understand the failings of its own small body. Certainly not to me, the girl at her side holding her bag, watching her disappear from me and go deep into her mind, where the right answer nearly always was. She’d leave me behind, leave us all behind, to commune with the perfection of her intellect. And when she returned, it was with a resolve that was almost frightening to see.
It was sad and cold to be outside her caring. It had scared me as a smaller child, made me cry.
As consolation, Mama had explained that one day I would join her when she left for her mind like that, that one day I would be a doctor, too, standing beside her, both our minds flying free while our bodies did the work. And we’d have a horse and carriage, and a sign with gold letters on it that said dr. sampson and daughter. “Wouldn’t that be nice, Libertie?” she’d said.
And that had been a kind of hollow comfort when she left me behind for her calculations.
Mr. Ben was watching her now. “It feels like I’m dying. Am I gonna die?”
Mama’s eyes filled up again, and she was back. “Not yet,” she said.
He propped himself up on his elbows. “This the worst pain I ever felt. I was whupped till my back was ribbons when I was a younger man, and I thought that was dying, but this is different. It feels like there’s a hole in me, in the very center of me, and the wind’s running through it.”
Mama sat back. “That’s a problem of the spirit.”
“So medicine women are supposed to fix that.”
“I’m a trained doctor,” Mama said, straightening up. “I fix the body. The spirit can tell me what’s wrong with the body sometimes. But what you are describing—you can talk to Reverend Harland at the church about the spirit.”
“Seems you should be able to do it all.”
I did not think, then, that Mama was even listening. If she had heard it, I was sure she had discounted it, because all she said was, “You will stay here to rest.”
The next morning, it took Mama and Madame Elizabeth and Lucien, struggling, to lift the empty coffin back onto the wagon bed it was so unwieldly. Finally, they slid it home.
Madame Elizabeth was just taking up the whip to prod the mule when Mama seized her friend’s hand and kissed the knuckles where they wrapped around the switch.
Madame Elizabeth looked startled. Lucien smirked—oh, how I hated him for that.
For Mama looked genuinely pained. “If you should run into any trouble—”
“We won’t,” Madame Elizabeth said.
“But if you should …” She held her friend’s hand for a beat more, then flung it away from her. “Be safe.”
Mr. Ben had come outside for this last bit. He bent his head slightly in the wagon’s direction. “Thanks, mamselle,” he said with slight mockery, to which Madame Elizabeth rolled her eyes.
Then she called to the mule, and they were on their way.
Mama stayed to watch them go. Mr. Ben stood beside her.
“Y’all ain’t afraid of getting caught?” he said.
“She’s very good at what she does.”
Mr. Ben sniffed. “When she’s not trying to murder a man.”
Mama glanced at me, then looked back to the road, where the wagon moved slowly away from us. “You made it here well enough.”
“Back in Maryland,” Mr. Ben said, “where I was before …” He looked down at his hands. “Before I was sold the first time, there was a group of niggers like you gals. They did what you doing. They got fifteen out. And then they was caught. You don’t want to hear what happened.”
Mama glanced again at me, then back at Mr. Ben. “We most certainly do not,” she said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Blood—”
“That’s enough,” Mama said. “Mr. Ben, if you’re well enough
