If the cut was deep enough, Mummy told me, if it was still bleeding after five to ten minutes of pressing down on it, if its edges seemed lacy or refused to come together, then there was no help for it, and my friend should go to the hospital. She doesn’t have the money, I said, and my mother replied, in her blunt way—inadvertently reminding me that white men writing philosophy books did not invent collective thinking—Then you help her, no? She can pay you back? That is what money is for.
