5. She left. She married Moses McWilliams. Moses will take care of me, surmised the fourteen-year-old girl. Moses would “make me a home.”

6. At fourteen, a wife. At 17, a mother to Leila, who would call herself A’Lelia. At twenty, a widow. Sarah McWilliams picked up and moved from Vicksburg to St Louis, where her four brothers worked as barbers. Sarah’s transit — from Louisiana to Mississippi to Missouri, and eventually New York — followed the Mississippi River northward out of agricultural country into the region where a lifestyle closer to comfort, and in rare cases even prosperity, was allegedly attainable.

7. Lelia attended public school.  Sarah McWilliams sent herself to night school. She married John Davis in 1894, and then divorced him a decade later. In St. Louis, where she lived for eighteen years, she worked as a washerwoman making $1.50 — “I was promoted from the fields to the wash tub,” she half-joked to the crowd.

8. In the speech W.E.B DuBois termed the Atlanta Compromise, Booker T. Washington exhorted his  audience to accept disenfranchisement, racist treatment, and segregation in exchange for the right to a free and basic education. Washington suggested Southern blacks “leave civil rights alone” and join him in “mak[ing] a businessman out of the Negro.” In 1900, backed by Andrew Carnegie, Washington organized the National Negro Business League persuaded by a similar principle: that freedom must be bought, not fought for, and the capital a black business class could build would amount to freedom’s price.

9. It was in St. Paul’s A.M.E Church that she made some girlfriends. It was through the church grapevine that she learned about, and then joined, the National Association of Colored Women. It was in smoked St. Louis bars that Scott Joplin tested out ragtime, the mother of jazz; it was by the name of the St. Louis Perfectos that the home baseball team started to win. It was after