Experience was tall and thin, with sharp elbows, and skin like a bruised peach. When she stood up to sing, she slumped her shoulders, as if she was afraid of her own height. Louisa, in contrast, was short, and as dark as me, and fat, with a flare of a burn scar down her forehead, which draped dramatically over her left eye. Whoever had tended to it when she’d gotten it had done well—it was nearly perfectly healed, only a dark flush color and, of course, raised above the rest of her smooth skin. She made up for it with pretty, round cheeks that flushed with red undertones whenever she took in breath to sing more loudly, and when she opened her mouth, I could see she had perfect pearls for teeth.
Mama had taught me long ago—the first tell of good health is the mouth. Louisa has probably never had a toothache, I thought, longingly. Experience, on the other hand, most definitely had. When she wasn’t singing, she kept her fist curled at the bottom of her chin, at the ready to cover her mouth whenever she was called upon to speak, because her bottom teeth were rotten.
I imagined a whole life for them there, while I watched. I thought they would never be what Madeline Grady said everyone at the college was: colorstruck. They moved together as they sang, and I thought they had found an escape from this world. I thought if I got as close as possible, I could maybe escape, too.
When the evening was over, I stood beside them.
“You are wonderful,” I said to Experience. Her eyes widened, and her shoulders shot back. I had startled her. I regretted it immediately.
“Well, thank you,” she said.
“You and Louisa, you are both really marvelous.”
“Mm-hmm,” she said uneasily. She was looking through the crowd, for her companion.
“Are you first-years here? I haven’t seen you yet.”
“This is our second year here. We are close to graduation. We are the only two women in the music department,” Experience said. “We wish, I wish, to be music teachers.” She had spotted Louisa, and made to move toward her. I followed, determined to keep speaking.
“If you wish to practice teaching,” I said, “then I would make an excellent practice pupil.”
“Who’s this?” Experience had reached Louisa, with me trailing behind, and now they both were looking at me, Louisa expectant, Experience as if she wanted to flee.
“Libertie Sampson,” I said. I held out my hand for a strong handshake—a gesture my mother had taught, which the proctors here, at least, discouraged.
Louisa took it, and I started to speak again.
“I was saying to Miss Experience—”
Louisa snorted at that.
“Experience,” I corrected myself, uncertain, “that if you needed to practice teaching a pupil, I am happy to do that with you.”
“Do you sing, then?”
“A little. In church, of course.”
“Well, come to where we practice. Near the market plots, by the river. It’s easier there,” Louisa said. And then she carefully pulled her hand out of mine and linked arms with Experience.
It was easy enough to convince them to let me listen to them practice. It was harder to learn their histories. Louisa was the more personable of the two. She was witty and liked to flirt with the boys, and even the lightest ones flirted back with her, because of the mark and her height and her chins. It was clear, everyone knew, that this was only in fun. She could imitate any animal sound with a whistle or a fold of her tongue—the call of a loon, the cluck of a turkey, the growl of a cat in the bush. She would use this menagerie to give a running commentary on the affairs of everyone at college. The handsomest boy, she referred to with the lurch of a katydid, and the prettiest, stubbornest girl, with a billy goat’s whinny. Everybody liked Louisa.
Experience was harder to know—she seemed to walk about in a kind of mist, the only thing dispelling it the sound of an instrument or Louisa’s voice. She was terribly serious about music. She could play any instrument you put in front of her. Her most prized possession was a small, battered metal pitch pipe. When I and the other students would gather to sing with her, she liked to mournfully blow it to call us to attention.
She would sit in the bare square of the future green, her skirts spread out before her, working on her scores, making notations, following the scrip of music.
I learned that Louisa and Experience were not from the same place. Louisa was from Virginia, and Experience was from South Carolina. That’s all they would tell me when I accosted them, giddy with the sound of their breath, after the first practice. The way they said it, quietly, with no more elaboration, I understood that they had been born enslaved, and that they were not prepared to tell me who or what they’d fought with to end up here, singing beauty in a cabin in the fields.
Willkommen,
lieber
schöner Mai,
Dir tönt der Vögel
Lobgesang
was what they sang in a round that first afternoon by the river.
And then, when they combined their voices, it was another thing altogether. I believed that to attempt to sing with them in harmony would be like pouring bacon grease into a vat of water.
But Louisa said, “I cannot trust you if you do not sing. Why are you around the two of us? Just to listen?”
“I’m not very good,” I said.
Experience shrugged impatiently. “That’s not possible.”
“Not as good as you,” I said.
Louisa sighed. “False modesty wins you no friends, you know.”
So I took a breath in. And I did it.
When I sang with Experience and Louisa, it was as if my very self merged with them. I was, I learned, a mezzo-soprano, and they each took pains to teach me how to make my voice stronger.
“You draw in air here,” Louisa said, pointing.
When I sang with them, my whole history fell away. There was no past, no promised future, only the present of one sustained note. When we sang together, we three stood in a round so that we could see one another’s faces—and it was almost unbearable, to sing a song and watch Louisa’s face change slightly and Experience’s voice respond, and then my own, struggling for just a minute to reach theirs.
When I sang with them, I entered something greater than my sorry, bitter self.
I thought that anyone with a voice as powerful as that could teach me how to bend my anger to my will. I sat on that riverbank, and I thought that I had finally found my ambition. It was not to set bones right or to become my mother’s double. It was to befriend the both of them, to make them love me and sing to me for the rest of my life. I knew this was a silly wish, but in my discombobulation at Cunningham College, I did not stop to question it. I knew enough to keep it quiet, to not speak it outright—not to Experience or Louisa, whom I did not wish to scare away, and not to Mrs. Grady, and certainly not to Mama. I spent the rest of the semester doing the bare minimum of work so I would not fail out of class and so I could keep meeting the two girls and have them sing to me.
Mama had told me freedom would come by following her, and I had known it was not true for a long time. Now I had someone else to follow, I was sure, and the thrill of having a new direction filled me up, blushed my cheeks, almost made me like the place. I put away my sticky journal to my imagined woman in the water and delighted in these real women, in front of me, made flesh.
“I wish my mama could hear you,” I said one afternoon. “I wish she could hear how fine you are.”
“I bet you wish your mama could do it,” Experience said, and though she was smiling slightly when she said it, I felt the sting in her words and I saw the bitterness in her eyes. I turned away, ashamed. I had said something wrong again.
Louisa took my arm in hers and walked with me a little farther down the riverbank. “You sure do talk about your mama a lot,” she said.
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
I looked down at my shoes. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not something you should mind,” Louisa said. “It is
hard for Experience because she lost hers. She doesn’t know where she is.”
“Oh.”
My rage burnt for an affront that was far less than hers. And here were the two of them not even hot, not even warm, just righteously cool in their voices. I had hoped that there would be a place where I found other burning bushes like me, willing to make the world anew with riotous anger. The fact that they had none unnerved me.
“But you do talk about your mother a lot, you do know?” Louisa gently chided. “It is always what your mama would think or what she would say or what she would like to say. Sometimes, I think your mama’s here with us on this riverbank.”
I walked on, in silence, ashamed again, until we heard a loud, rude croak from a frog ahead of us, more like a belch.
“See,” Louisa said. “There she go,” and I swatted her arm in laughter.
Dear Mama,
I have met the two most extraordinary girls, whose voices
Dear Libertie,
Today we had an interesting case: a young Hebrew serving girl
I believe can lead us to a kind of promised land. I know that sounds like a
with inflammation of the uvula and palate and an inclination to swallow
fancy and like a dream, but that’s what their singing is like to me. Together,
during the night.
they could be the greatest singers our world has yet heard.
What would you prescribe, Libertie?
Dear Mama,
Do you remember, Mama, when there was the bad fever a few years ago? And the churches took to pealing bells to count the dead? Two tolls for a man, three tolls for a woman, one for a child. And how at night you would hear each ring of the bell, and wait, wait, wait for the next ring—whose life were you hearing called out? Whose life was coming to you through the dark? The Graces’ singing is like that. Except you’re waiting to hear about life beginning, not ending. And it is marvelous.
PS. I would prescribe, I think, Cimicifuga.
Dear Libertie,
I remember that, of course, Libertie, but I’m not sure what you mean by the rest. I am glad you are finding amusement there, but please do not forget your purpose.
Yesterday, a woman came to me with a toothache, caused by the damp night air. What would you prescribe?
Mama—
Nux m., cepa, rhus. Wind: aeon., puis., rhus, sil. Draught: bell., calc, chin., sulph.
Libertie
I would go to the barrels of water Madeline Grady kept in her yard and take off the cover and try to catch my reflection in the black-silver surface there. She once found me like this, and I said, by way of explanation, “I am not a good daughter.”
“Well, that’s just pure nonsense if I ever heard it.”
“I don’t think I can be what she wishes me to be,” I said. “I feel too much, and she’s never felt like this at all.”
Madeline Grady fixed me with a hard stare. “I’ve never met a girl as hard-pressed on making life difficult for herself as you, Libertie,” she said. “Usually, it’s men get caught in that current. I always thought women had more sense. But I suppose you live long enough, you see everything.” And she sucked her teeth and looked for her wooden ladle, and I hated her, a little bit, for seeing me so well.
I’d rather have had my mother and her obliviousness. There is a greater comfort in being unseen than being understood and dismissed.
Sometimes, I thought Madeline Grady was wiser than any of us, but Experience and Louisa were not admirers of her. When they found out where I lived, they exchanged a look that I eagerly asked them to explain.
“What? What is it?”
“Well,” Louisa said, “Mr. Grady is a sad man.”
“Why? What’s the matter with him?” I said, alarmed.
“He is very brilliant,” Experience said hesitantly.
“Yes, very learned,” Louisa said.
“And why should that cause you to feel sorry for him?” I said.
They looked at each other, and then they gave me the same pitying look.
“Well, you have seen his wife?”
“Yes, you have seen his wife?”
“Yes,” I said slowly. I did not want to hear all the unkind things I’d thought of Madeline Grady said aloud by these two girls.
But they were subtler than me. “It’s a study of what can happen when you do not let pure romantic love lead you,” Experience said.
“When lust takes over,” Louisa said theatrically.
Then they both laughed. I smiled, as well. I wished, perhaps, they were joking.
“Madeline Grady was a laundress when they met,” Experience said.
“Well, that’s respectable.”
“Yes, but she was not just a laundress. She sold beer and spirits from her home.”
“That’s how her first husband died,” Louisa said. “The father of her two boys. He mistook a barrel of lime for beer one night and drank a whole draught before he realized, and then he died in agony.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“And then, she went to see Grady, to help her claim her husband’s pension, and in a matter of course, the two have their little girl, and are married right before she was delivered.”
“And Grady, the best colored legal mind of his generation is interrupted before he even gets a chance to leave here.”
“She has thrift and grift to support him,” Louisa said. “She’s got the constitution for it.”
“Yes,” Experience said. “Those shoulders.” And they both glanced at my own, as if judging how broad they were, to see if they were as broad as Madeline Grady’s.
“But it really is a study in what can go wrong when a brilliant colored man makes the wrong choice for a wife,” Louisa said.
In the women’s dining room at Cunningham College, there was a big panel of fabric, with green velvet leaves bordering a list stitched out in red thread, three meters high.
MAN IS STRONG—WOMAN, BEAUTIFUL
MAN IS DARING AND CONFIDENT—WOMAN, DEFERENT AND UNASSUMING
MAN IS GREAT IN ACTION—WOMAN, IN SUFFERING
MAN SHINES ABROAD—WOMAN, AT HOME
MAN TALKS TO CONVINCE—WOMAN, TO PERSUADE AND PLEASE
MAN HAS A RUGGED HEART—WOMAN, A SOFT AND TENDER ONE
MAN PREVENTS MISERY—WOMAN, RELIEVES IT
MAN HAS SCIENCE—WOMAN, TASTE
MAN HAS JUDGMENT—WOMAN, SENSIBILITY
MAN IS A BEING OF JUSTICE—WOMAN, AN ANGEL OF MERCY
The first time I read it, I thought, Then what is a man? I thought of my mother, of course, and myself. I tried to parcel out where she lay on the fabric, but she was somewhere in between. Men then, for me, were still too terrifying to contemplate directly. They were an abstract. The only man I had seen up close was Mr. Ben, and he was not described by any of the words on that quilt. The left side of the quilt may as well have been stitched in gold thread; that was how fanciful a man’s character was to me. And I had never known anyone who would claim Mama had taste and not science, who would call her deferent and unassuming.
I regarded that quilt as a kind of private joke, something no one who had eyes could believe. I saw its falseness again when I came home to find Mrs. Grady sitting, skirt spread out in front of her, on the kitchen floor.
“It’s the last of it,” she said, turning out the flour sack. “The school is behind on paying for the laundry, and we’ll be short by next week.”
I flushed. “Mama sent you my share, didn’t she?”
Mrs. Grady nodded. “It’s already spent, girl.”
“But why don’t you tell Mr. Grady? I’m sure he will give you more for the household accounts.”
And at this, Mrs. Grady laughed for a long time, rolling the sack into a tighter and tighter ball as she did so.
“It’s me give him his money. Do you think we’d be eating our dinner under other women’s drawers if Grady had anything for a ‘household account’?” And then she laughed again.
<
br /> But that night, at dinner, she said nothing, and when Grady looked up from his plate and asked if there was any more tea for that evening, Mrs. Grady just smiled and said she had forgotten it. And then a cloud passed over his face, a recognition, and Grady stood up and went to his study.
The Gradys may have followed the rules of that quilt, but only by a kind of willed fiction between the two of them.
Mama and Madeline Grady and Lenore insisted that men were to be babied and entertained, but not obeyed. The Graces seemed to revere obedience, at least in the abstract. Louisa and Experience, these girls I loved, who I thought held providence on their tongues, were so sure of themselves. I began to doubt myself. Perhaps the rules Mama and Lenore and Madeline Grady lived by were wrong. Or not wrong, but they seemed only to apply in the velvet waiting room and whitewashed examination room of Mama’s practice or in the humid air of Mrs. Grady’s laundry. And how good was a rule, how strong, how sensible was it to obey, if it lost all meaning as soon as you left your front door?
I wondered who Experience and Louisa would pick if they could pick their mate, since it was so important. Both were ignored by the men of Cunningham College, though they did not seem bothered by this.
“The other ones here, they call us the Graces because they think they’re clever,” Louisa told me. “Look at Experience. She’s bright, but gawky.”
I tried very hard not to look at Experience. “No, she is not,” I said.
Louisa laughed. “Yes, she is. Not naming it isn’t gonna change it.”
“I’m gawky,” Experience said, and that set Louisa to laughing.
“And I’m like you, Libertie,” Louisa said. “Pretty but dark. And fat. And this scar. Altogether helpless. They called us the Graces, and maybe it’s meant to be an insult or a tease or a joke, but I think it’s a love note.”
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