He sniffed again. “I suppose so.”
“Good,” Mama said. “The best way to help is to stay quiet and stay out of the way, then. Don’t let anybody who comes to the house see you yet.”
“Your neighbors don’t know you in this business? Mamselle Elizabeth told me she was bringing me to an all-colored town.”
“We are,” Mama said. “You’ll settle well here. But it’s best if we allow people to truthfully say they thought you came here on your own. Generally, we take care of each other here. But I don’t want to put anyone into a position of lying for us. It’s too dangerous. Besides, you know as well as I do, Mr. Ben. Even with our own, you can’t trust everybody.”
He looked out over the yard again, to the barn and the squat crab-apple tree, to the hog pen with the two pigs just now rising from the mud to wander, to Mama’s medicine garden and the small field that lay just beyond it, where we grew the vegetables for the kitchen, to all the things that I’d just told him she owned.
“I suppose that’s right,” he said. “Just because a person’s a nigger doesn’t mean they know the life you do.” Then he looked at Mama and stalked back into the house.
I slipped my hand into hers.
“What does he mean, Mama?”
“He has just suffered a great shock to his system and won’t make much sense for a while.”
“Because you and Madame Elizabeth got him free?”
She took her hand out of mine and knelt so that we could look each other in the eye. I did not like this at all. I preferred looking up at her, tilting my head back till all I saw was her chin. Eye to eye was more frightening.
People said Mama was a beautiful woman, but I think what they really meant was she was light enough to pass. She had large eyes, true, set deep in her skull, but they were more owl-like than anything else. She had a heavy brow, hooded, that made it look as though she was about to scowl, even when she was laughing. Her skin, of course, was pale but it was sallow. It was her one vanity, the only one she allowed me to witness anyways—she dried lily petals in the spring and ate them year-round, to make the tone of her cheeks even. It was, up until this moment, my favorite secret we shared between us. I was the only one who saw her do it. Her nose was straight—I think this is what people meant when they called her beautiful—but it was severe. Her lips were the only pretty thing about her, the same as mine, full and always resolving themselves into the shape of a rose. When I looked at her, I never saw my own face, and maybe that is why I found it so disturbing, these times when she’d kneel down to look me in the eye.
I preferred, at that age, to think of us as the same person. I was still young enough for that.
She looked me in the eye and said, “What did you say?”
“You got him free. You and Madame Elizabeth. You got him here to be free.”
She looked me steadily in the eye. Finally. “This is true.”
I expected her to stand again, but she did not. “You cannot repeat to anyone what you just said to me—”
“But why?”
“This is not a game, Libertie. What we did, what we are doing, is very dangerous. If you tell somebody, it would not end well for us. We would go to jail, Mr. Ben would go back to bondage, and you and I would never see each other again. Do you understand?”
I did not, entirely. But to admit this would not please her, so I nodded.
She stood up and put her hand on her hip. The sun was finally out, and we could see, in the new light, Lenore coming up the road. Lenore was not a big woman, but she still managed to roll her hips when she walked, and she liked to ball her skirts in her two fists and switch them this way and that, to keep the dust off her. Mama was insistent that no dust be brought into the examination room, except by her patients themselves, and made Lenore wipe herself down with damp cloth and beat her skirt with a straw brush before she could join her each day, so Lenore had devised this method to make it a bit easier.
She made her way to us, where we stood, glanced at me.
“The girl up?”
“I woke up before anyone,” I said proudly.
Lenore gave Mama a look.
“I told her,” Mama said. “She says she can keep a secret.”
“She a child,” Lenore said.
“I can do it,” I said again.
Lenore looked steadily at my mother, and my mother looked back for a bit, then lowered her eyes.
“It’s not safe for the baby to be up,” Lenore said.
“I’m not a baby,” I insisted.
Lenore sighed. “Grown folks know when to keep quiet. Babies run they mouths every which way. Y’all can’t help it.” Her voice was drained of malice. She was merely stating a fact. This wounded my pride even more. Worse, she was not even looking at me when she said it; she was looking at Mama.
“Dr. Sampson, I won’t get sold to a slavecatcher because a child can’t stop talking.”
“Nobody’s saying that’s going to happen,” Mama said.
“Still”—Lenore moved past her, to the house, to start the fire burning for the day—“you can’t trust babies with the ways of the world.”
We were alone together again.
“I am not a baby, Mama.”
She looked at me skeptically.
“I can help. I can do what you do. Let me help.”
“You cannot, Libertie.”
“Mama,” I said, “you always say that when I am big, you and I will have a horse and carriage together, with ‘Dr. Sampson and Daughter’ written in
