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Raye sat as usual in her maroon wingback chair, a bemused look on her face. I could not fathom why Amy and I were being brought together. As a joke to myself I wondered: Could this woman be Mzee’s belated bag of clay?

I learned something from Amy recently that I thought might interest you, said Raye, leaning forward.

There was a long silence, during which I was highly conscious of the powdered pinkness of Amy’s face and the mock-orange scent of her perfume. At last she began to speak. She spoke of her son, Josh—a word which in Olinka means turban—and of how he had been for many years a patient of Raye’s. She spoke his name softly, tentatively, as if unsure she had a right to it. He had danced with a major ballet company throughout his twenties, after which he had had a hard time keeping up. Aging, out of work, depressed, he’d killed himself while still in his thirties.

Almost from birth he suffered from depression, said Amy. And almost from birth, she continued, with a self-deprecating look from Raye to me, I hauled him off to the shrink. Like the dutiful little soldier he was, he went unprotesting to have his head and heart examined by a succession of psychiatrists in an effort to adjust to my incessant cheerfulness: a sunniness so persistent it drove his father, a man of normal, up-and-down emotions, away. No matter what happened to me, I rose above it, said Amy, as my own mother had taught me to do, and as she herself had always done. She was a Southern belle in the Scarlett O’Hara mode. Poor for much of her life, but then fabulously wealthy finally because she married my father, who owned a lot of downtown New Orleans.

Here she paused and looked out the window. It was February; across the street the acacias were in bloom. The three of us were quiet, enjoying the look of the fine yellow fuzziness against the new and tender green. I was more puzzled than ever. I glanced sidelong at Raye, but she was sitting back in her chair, her eyes warmly encouraging as she gazed at Amy’s face. I realized this was not her first time hearing this.

Amy laced her thin fingers together and cleared her throat. How old was she? I wondered. Seventy-five? Eighty? Older? She seemed remarkably fit, whatever her age. It was only when he wound up here, with Raye, she said, that he began to suspect the depression he’d always carried was mine.

What do you mean? I said.

I mean, said Amy, sighing, that when I was a very little girl I used to touch myself…there. It was a habit that mortified my mother. When I was three years old she bound my hands each night before I was put to bed. At four she put hot pepper sauce on my fingers. At six years of age our family doctor was asked to excise my clitoris.

Is New Orleans America? I asked suspiciously. For this was all I could think to say.

Yes, said Amy, I assure you it is. And yes, I am telling you that even in America a rich white child could not touch herself sexually, if others could see her, and be safe. It is different today, of course. And even back then not every parent reacted as my mother did. But that I was not the only one this happened to I am sure.

I don’t believe you, I said, rising to go. For I saw the healthy green leaves of my America falling seared to the ground. Her sparkling rivers muddy with blood.

Raye rose also and placed a hand on my arm. I was angry with her, and I knew the look in my eyes expressed it. How dare she subject me to such lies!

Wait, she said.

I sat.

Amy smiled, a small, modest smile, in spite of her tense mouth that was shaped into a wider grin. You think you are the only African woman to come to America don’t you? she asked.

Actually, I did think this. Black American women seemed to me so different from Olinka women, I rarely thought of their African great-great-grandmothers.

Many African women have come here, said Amy. Enslaved women. Many of them sold into bondage because they refused to be circumcised, but many of them sold into bondage