Libertie

by Kaitlyn Greenidge

  “Ben Daisy is—”

  “Ben what?” Miss Hannah said.

  Mama reddened. “It is what the children sometimes call him here.”

  “Why would they say that?”

  “He, well—”

  “He has a good Christian name.” Miss Hannah kept talking. “We was gonna choose ours together, when we got free. We was gonna be the Smiths, on account of our mama saying our daddy always wanted a smithy someday. Why you call him by that woman’s name?”

  “Then you know her?”

  Miss Hannah sniffed, in distaste. “Before we agreed to run, he fell hard in love with that woman. I thought it would be good for him. He was just beat something awful for trying to run, and after that I thought he was lost to us. He only stared at the wall. But then he found Daisy, and she liked him enough. I hoped it was a good thing. Have a little fun, remember what sweetness this world can hold, so he’d want to stay here in it. He was talkin’ ’bout drowning before he met Daisy. But he met her and he was happy. For a while. He turned sick with love. That Daisy, he’d do anything for her. She didn’t deserve him. You know, he’d save up what little money he could and buy her butter to lick.

  “And you know how that little girl repaid him? Three springs ago she ran away without him, even though she knew me and him was fixing to run, too. That little girl didn’t even warn him or nothing, just up and disappeared. They found her body a few miles away, with the man she run with, both of ’em torn apart by the paddyroller’s dogs.

  “And every spring like this, he pines for her worse and worse. I thought he’d do better when we made our escape. That’s why I had him go first, even though it was risky. He didn’t even want freedom anymore. He says she’s his love. Says she’s all he’s ever had. Easier to love a haint than this broken world. For him, anyways. And if I have to hear that Daisy’s name one more time, I’ll scream.”

  Miss Hannah set down her mug and glared, back and forth, at Mama and Madame Elizabeth, her chest heaving.

  “We’ll take you to him, then,” Mama said, her voice low.

  And the five of us—me, Lucien, Madame Elizabeth, Mama, and Miss Hannah—put our cloaks on to walk through the dusk to Culver’s back room.

  I did not understand then. Can a child, who has so few memories, no history of her own, know what it is to be haunted? To understand a ghost is to have an understanding of time that is not possible for a child. Children can feel spirits, but they do not discriminate between the living and the dead the way adults do. For them, it is all the living. And so I did not understand the look of anguish on Mama’s face as we got closer to the reunion, and I did not understand why Miss Hannah was so angry at a dead woman, and I still did not understand why I felt so sad around Mr. Ben.

  But I was about to learn.

  The only people allowed in Culver’s back room were newcomers. More and more often, new people were appearing—not just the ones brought by Madame Elizabeth, but those who found us on their own. If you saw an unrecognizable face in town, someone new walking down the roads, who tried to stay close to the underbrush so that they could run, we all knew to send that person first to Culver’s. In those days, you did not ask about the past of the newly arrived. They’d stay for a few nights, and then they would find a room or take a lot from one of the deacons of our church and put together a home of their own.

  It was not families who arrived like this. It was mostly men. We welcomed them, of course, and most of them eventually settled in. But a few of them, maybe four or five, never fully joined us. Even after they’d found places to live and women to love, they still returned to the back of Culver’s pharmacy to meet up with those most like themselves.

  The back-room visitors would sit and watch Culver work. It was where Culver mixed up the different-colored remedies of his shop. He poured each one into the saltmouth and tincture glass bottles, as tall as a child.

  Culver sold the back-room people beer and rum, even though we were a dry town. But the deacons and Reverend Harland pretended not to know Culver’s back room, only obliquely mentioning it in their sermons, and Culver was careful that only colored people drank there. The few times white men tried to come and sit, they just saw Culver painstakingly measuring out the granules and liquids that turned the remedies their necessary hue.

  Like every child in our village, I knew the people of the back room well. All had been christened with their own nicknames, which we sang to them. The people of Culver’s back room had all lost themselves. They had returned in their minds back to the places they’d run from, the places they didn’t name, even to their fellow travelers. So maybe when the boys yelled at them and the girls braided their names into song, we were trying to call them back to us. At least, that’s what I tell myself now. The alternative hurts too much to bear.

  There was Otto Green Leaf. Otto lived only four houses down from Culver’s. It was a straight line home for him. But one night, he didn’t return home, and when his wife called for him the next day, the three or four men in Culver’s back room searched for him for hours. They found him in a field, two miles away. He said he’d gotten lost. His wife brought him home, but he kept wandering out, to sleep among the cabbages. He could only sleep in dirt, it seemed, from then on. After he’d found his way out of Culver’s room, you’d see him every morning rising from the fields, his shirt covered in mud and dew, blinking at the dawn.

  There was Birdie Delilah, the only woman who regularly went to Culver’s. She became certain that her daughter, whom she’d lost in some way she never told any of us, had returned to her in the form of the woodpecker who lived under Culver’s eaves. All night, she sat in Culver’s back room, drinking corn whiskey until her eyes shone, waiting for the woodpecker to start her pestering when the moon was high. At the sound of the first knock, Birdie Delilah’s whole face, which before had been dour and cold and slick with sweat from the burn of her drink, would light up, and she would begin to suck her teeth in response to the bird, steady in her conversation.

  And there was Pete Back Back, who came to us still covered in sores from the whipping that drove him to run. No matter what Mama did, what compresses or dilutions she tried, his back wouldn’t heal and his wounds remained as fresh as the day he first got them.

  They were all there when we arrived with Mr. Ben’s sister. The room was warm and small and dark, lit only by a few lamps up high. It smelled sharp and too sweet. When my eyes adjusted and I saw all the regulars, I was not so afraid. Mama and I had seen the people of Culver’s back room out and about in town so often they no longer scared us.

  But when Madame Elizabeth stepped in behind us, she drew her shawl over her mouth, and Miss Hannah, coming in right behind her, poor Miss Hannah began to cry.

  Ben Daisy was sitting up, talking to Pete Back Back, who was steadfastly ignoring every word out of his mouth, in favor of the drink in his hand.

  “She smelled like the ocean,” Ben Daisy was saying. “I only smelled the ocean once, back when I was in Maryland, but that’s what she smelled like. Good, clean salt. I told you ’bout her hair, didn’t I? And her eyes? I’d tell you about the rest, but a lady’s present …” Here, he looked sideways at Birdie Delilah, and then he looked up and saw his sister and he stopped talking.

  Miss Hannah stepped a little more forward. “Ben?”

  “So they got you here, too, did they?” He peered past Miss Hannah and caught Madame Elizabeth’s eye. “So you managed not to kill my sister this time, like y’all did me?”

  Madame Elizabeth did not respond. On her face was a look of the utmost pity, which seemed to annoy Mr. Ben even further.

  “She got you good, Hannah.”

  “Ben, you look a mess.”

  “You would, too, if you’d been through what I have,” Mr. Ben said. “Drug here in a coffin all by myself.”

  Miss Hannah knelt down beside him and touched his arm. “I came that way, too.”

  He wouldn’t look at her. Looked down at the floor instead. Took ano
ther sip of his drink.

  “They tell you the food here is horrible?” he said.

  Miss Hannah gasped, laughed, then finally allowed herself to fully sob.

  She turned to Mama. “You let my brother live like this?” she said, her voice breaking. “You let ’em all live like this? These people are not well.”

  Mama put her hand up to her mouth and only nodded.

  “You said you was a doctor. She said …” Miss Hannah turned and looked at Madame Elizabeth. “She said you knew how to help people and make ’em safe.”

  “I tried,” Mama said, but then stopped herself. Her words sounded so lost, in this small, hot room.

  “He can’t stay here,” Miss Hannah said. “None of ’em can stay here.”

  Culver looked up from his bench. “No one’s forcing anyone to stay. We stay together because we like it.”

  Miss Hannah ignored him, pulled at her brother’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “Come with me.”

  He did not move at first. He did not move for a long time. We all stood, and watched, while she pulled at his arm and said, “Come with me,” until it became almost unbearable—her ask, his refusal.

  But finally, he stood up and put his arm through hers, and Miss Hannah guided him from the room.

  I think it was that—more than Miss Hannah’s shaming, more than Ben Daisy’s glassy eyes and his lips muttering nonsense, it was the fact that he would follow his sister out of the room, because of Miss Hannah’s patience, that convinced Mama of how badly she had failed. And I saw her, standing right there beside me, disappear again, into the world of her ambition.

  She was going to make him right.

  I do not know when, exactly, she started it. The letter she sent to begin it all, she wrote alone—she took the rare step of not dictating it to me. She must have written it that same night, when she realized she had lost Ben Daisy, because it was only a week or so later that I stood beside her in Culver’s shop as she looked at the mail that had come for her and she turned to me, the envelope still in her hand, and bent down, and she hugged me, hard—she never hugged hard—and told me excitedly, “We can begin.”

  That afternoon, she gathered me and Lenore in her examination room and told us that she had decided to run a proving.

  A proving is when you bring together a small group of volunteers to take a new dose, a new remedy. It is a way to test what can be a cure. Everyone tracks their reactions to the substance, minutely, and then you compare notes. With enough provings, you begin to understand the cures that are available to you, what will produce those reactions in the body, that push and pull that homeopathy rests on.

  Since Mama was a colored woman, other homeopaths did not invite her to partake in their provings. She had to read the medical journals carefully, comparing articles and footnotes, making her own notations. She was looking for their mistakes. She had been doing this for years—it was what she often did late at night, when the books were done and committee work put away.

  For this, her first proving, she told us that she wrote away to a man out west, a scientist like her. A colored naturalist who had recently come back from West Africa, where he had taken an all-black group of explorers. A wondrous thing. I remembered reading aloud an article to her about it a few months earlier. It had appeared in the Mystery—a newspaper Madame Elizabeth sometimes brought us with one of her emptied coffins. There, on the front page, was an account of his tour. I noticed the article because it had the place I had been named for, my father’s dream, in the title: “Martin Delany’s Exploration of Liberia.”

  At first, when I’d read it aloud, Mama, as always, was skeptical of any talk of homelands and empires—“It is futile to imagine, Libertie,” she said. But she made me stop and read one line, three times, to make sure she understood:

  The Emigration Board of Commissioners has asked Mr. Delany to make a scientific inquiry into the topographical, geological and geographic qualities of the Niger Valley to determine whether it can host a colony of American Negroes.

  So Mama had remembered him, and had sent him her secret letter, and now, in the palm of her hand, she had the results.

  Delany had sent a small package, passed hand to hand, through every African Methodist Episcopal preacher in the North. All the way from Ohio, to us, in Kings County. Reverend Harland himself had delivered it to Culver’s counter, though he’d felt a need to write, underneath Delany’s hand, the admonishment For good, Doctor.

  Mama bristled at that. “As if it would be for anything else.”

  Now, in her examination room, Mama had me unwrap the package for her. I pulled at the twine and the paper—“Gentle now, Libertie, gentle with your hands”— until it fell open. Wrapped in the brown paper were ten dried seahorses, curled over one another. Their skin was a low, dusky yellow, the same color as the oranges we studded with cloves every Christmas and left to desiccate in our linen trunk to keep our good cloth smelling sweet. I looked up at Mama. “Just as Delany promised,” she said. “He’s a good man.”

  The very first task was to grind the dried seahorses into a gray powder, which smelled like the bottom of a privy and clung to the palms of your hands in a fine, damp silt.

  “‘The male seahorse can be found in the estuary of the Niger River,’” Mama read from Delany’s letter, as Lenore ground and I was instructed to transcribe into a notebook, what was to be the experiment’s log. “‘He is a solitary creature. He does not swim in packs. He only interacts with his female counterpart to mate. He floats through the dark, temperate in-between world of brackish water alone, with only his secret for creation.’” Here, Mama broke off. “Delany believes he is some sort of poet, I suppose,” she said, and frowned. She did not like flights of fancy. She especially resented them when people tried to mix them up with science.

  When Lenore had finished grinding, we moved on to dilution. Mama had told us she would begin this trial with a 2C dilution, which meant we added one hundred grams of water to one gram of seahorse, and then another hundred grams, until we had our solution.

  Finally, Lenore passed the vial over to me for the succussion. I took the vial and slapped it against the special board of leather and horsehair Mama had in her office for the purpose.

  As I pumped my arms up and down, shaking the cure, Mama read some more. “‘The male seahorse is a virtuous beast, romantic and loyal, steadfast in his heart and in his affections, the moral light of the animal kingdom. The male seahorse is not a profligate; he is frugal with his affections. When he mates, he mates for life. Every morning, he wakes and performs a dance with his partner—it is not a mating dance, but a dance that reaffirms their commitment to each other and the deep affection and love between the two. If he loses his mate, he will remain alone for the rest of his short life, unable to replace her with another.’”

  Here, Mama stopped. “That’s it,” she said. “Make sure to get that part when you write the notes, Libertie.”

  When the solution was done, Mama told me to put it on her highest shelf. And then she sat down and wrote a letter of apology to Ben Daisy.

  It did not seem to be a great burden for her to apologize, and I remember thinking this strange. I had never seen my mother do it before, but she wrote this letter with ease, as if she was sending off a note to Madame Elizabeth. When she was done, she handed it to me, to bring to Mr. Culver and ask him to read it to Ben Daisy or Miss Hannah the next time they came in.

  On the way to town, I carefully ripped the edges of the letter open to see what she had written there, but it was only pleasantries, a single sentence with “profound apologies,” and an invitation to Ben Daisy, and Ben Daisy alone, for tea in a few days’ time.

  He came. I was surprised he came, but he did. It was the end of the workday, and he had clearly had a good one downtown—he smelled of clean sweat, and he was smiling when he walked in. “What’s this?” he said, laughing. “You sure you happy to see me?”

  Mama smiled and nodded. She had asked Lenore to make a c
ake. She placed the cake in the middle of her examination room table and led him there. She took her place on the small wooden seat.

  “Now,” Mama said as she spread her skirts out about her, “how are you, Mr. Ben?”

  He looked taken aback, but he answered. “Fine, Miss Doctor, just fine,” he replied. “Figure I may as well pass the time with you ladies, and now that I’ve got such a warm welcome, you’ll be hard pressed to get me to leave.” He laughed again.

  Mama laughed, too. They talked for a bit more. Mama reached over to cut Ben Daisy a slice of cake, and when he caught that, he smiled, a little meaner. She placed the slice in a square of cloth, put it in the palm of his hand. He hunched over to eat it, looking at her sideways.

  I sat on a stool in the corner. Mama had told me beforehand to only begin when she gave me the signal. At last, Mama lifted one finger, and I picked up my pen.

  “I wish to talk to you a bit about Daisy.”

  I watched his shoulders slump forward, ever so slightly, and then back upright, as if he had remembered something. “So that’s what you want,” he said.

  “You miss her,” Mama said.

  It was quiet for a bit. But then Ben Daisy trusted himself enough to say “She was a fine gal. I miss her something terrible.”

  “What if I could give you something,” Mama said. “Something to help with the pain.”

  “I’ve already got that down at Culver’s.” Ben Daisy laughed sadly.

  “But Culver’s whiskey doesn’t help you,” Mama said.

  “It’ll do what it’ll do.”

  “But it makes you listless and miss your work. It makes you quarrel with your sister.”

  Ben Daisy was quiet. Then he said, “What does Hannah want from me?”

  “Nothing,” Mama said.

  “That’s right. It’s all nothing.” Ben Daisy lifted his head off the back of the chair and put his hands on the arms, ready to push himself off the big leather seat and out our door.