Libertie

by Kaitlyn Greenidge

  Once, in her office, I found the discards of her attempts at praise for the other women, written on the backs of notes to the pharmacist and on the discarded labels of old medicine bottles.

  You’ve done fine work, and I look forward to your work improving even more.

  Although at first I was not sure, I see now you are a true Christian woman.

  It was as if she could not, in spite of herself, break her reserve and warmly compliment any of these women, who’d discarded her from their care.

  “You see, I am not very talented at this.”

  I started. Mama was standing beside me, watching me read her weak words. I think it was the first time she admitted a failing to me.

  I felt a little flush of embarrassment for her.

  “Libertie,” she said, “write something for me. Kind, but not too kind. Nothing that would inspire envy.”

  “You cannot do it?”

  “I do not have a way with words, like you do.” She sighed. Then she said, very quietly, “The only good poem I’ve ever written is you. A daughter is a poem. A daughter is a kind of psalm. You, in the world, responding to me, is the song I made. I cannot make another.”

  My heart filled but quickly sank, because what freeborn thing can bear to be loved as much as that?

  The least I could do was write a poem for her.

  They were supposed to be anonymous. That was the whole point. It was my job at the meeting to take the unsigned works out of the box and read them to the room, with no bias. At the next meeting, when I took out the paper written in my own hand but elongated to look like Mama’s, I stood up before them all and sang the love my mama had for the women there. The love she would have sung, if she’d had the voice for it.

  True women friends are fine and rare

  You search for them, here and there

  The bonds between us bloom like a rose

  For we are companions true affection has chose

  Within our hearts lie trust and faith

  Our true friendship, bonds will never break

  Mama was not a good poet. Neither, at fourteen, was I.

  But those women heard that awful poetry and smiled and clapped, and when I revealed it was my mama who wrote it, they said, “Very fine, Dr. Sampson. Very fine indeed.” It was as if she had proven that she was one of them again, because she could praise them so warmly, even if the praise was clumsy. Maybe because of that. It was what they had been waiting for, and there was a kind of thawing in their relations.

  Even rude love is better than no show of love at all. That must be why you took Ben Daisy, I thought to the woman in the water.

  That is how I remember the rest of the war: my hands covered in the flour dust from long-baked biscuits at the bottom of the tin of love poems, the tips of my fingers stained with black ink, and Mama searching for every opportunity to be useful. I learned during the war how to scheme for the best way to set the world right, to change it. And I knew that this change was wrapped up in the love notes these women wrote to one another and dropped into a box, even as the world around us burnt.

  Which world was burning, anyways? I wrote this question out to her, the woman in the water. After each meeting of the Ladies’ Intelligence Society, I took what little bits were left of the poems and made a book of my own.

  What did Ben Daisy say she liked? Pink and white and gold. Cakes and candy. Scent bottles and silk. I left pansies alone, but I collected everything else I could for her.

  These things were hard to come by in our hamlet. We did not eat or buy sugar, because slaves made it—Mama was one of the few who were righteous enough to observe this boycott. But then, with the war, it wasn’t to be had anyways. So I took to dripping honey in the pages of the book, underlining each question to the lady with a thick golden smear. Into the honey, I pressed flower petals, and then I let the page dry and started another one.

  The songs I wrote in my book were made for the woman under the water, the one who offered something other than this world.

  Is the water really better?

  Should we all just try to drown?

  Is your love better than this world?

  Which world is burning, anyways?

  I thought it was the world that drove Ben Daisy under the water, that kept Pete Back Back pocked with sores, that conspired to steal and beat and kill the children of the women around as soon as they left their wombs. So, what was there, really, to mourn? In annihilation, I saw a celebration. My book to the lady became a place to celebrate the destruction of all the devices of this world that had tried to snare my people and snap us in two, that had sworn to kill every last one of us one way or another.

  And even as the wider world did not agree, did not even care what the women around me thought or believed, discounted colored women as entirely irrelevant—the thing to remember, I learned, was that these women, here, loved one another and cared for one another as no other. Even for my shifty, jumpy, defeated Mama, they cared. And from that care grew a steady foundation.

  When the war ended, I ran through the streets with everyone else, crying and saying my hosannas. Finally, the world I had dreamt of, had prayed for, was on its way.

  A bunch of us colored girls and boys ran all the way down to the waterfront. We danced on the boards of the wharf, and I even leaned over the side to whisper into the waves of the water a “Thank you.” I half believed, even though I knew I was fooling myself, that this was all her doing.

  We left the riverbank at dawn, headed for home, and I walked backward the whole way, while the other girls laughed and the boys called me silly. I looked toward the river. I watched the sky for fires and probed the earth for blood.

  Now, the newspapers were full of longing, not battles. White people longing for their sons’ bodies, hoping they were whole. If their bodies did not come back intact, then what would happen to these good white Christian boys on Judgment Day? They would stand up in their graves and topple back down, as on some overgrown battlefield their errant leg or lost foot would rise without the rest of them. They made it sound like a horror. But I read each notice as the reports rolled in during that jostling year after the war, and prayed to the woman who had taken Ben Daisy under Keep their arms scattered and their legs separated. Keep them without integrity when Judgment Day comes.

  It was a small price to pay, in my opinion. The war had broken bodies apart, and that seemed to be what caused so much terror among the whites, what made them shoot their own president. But I had stood in Culver’s back room and seen the people broken from slavery, I had held that orphan girl in my arms, I had seen so many die from those same white people’s hatred that I could not muster any sympathy for their terror, and I could definitely not feel it on my own.

  They did not care for us. I would not care for them. I would only care for the women around me, the woman in the water, and Mama, of course.

  It was the closest I’d come, at that point in my life, to a state of jubilee. Something that people had told us was impossible for two hundred years was here—colored people were free, the slaveholders were defeated, and everything around me led me to believe that it would be this way forever.

  It was finally time for the Ladies’ Intelligence Society to show their care for the world, which they did with a building they bought for Mama’s hospital downtown. They decided that a location near the wharfs could serve more of the colored women in Kings County, and maybe some others adventurous or rich enough to take a boat from lower Manhattan. a colored women’s hospital was painted carefully on the sign there, and we all cheered when it was finally raised up and nailed above the door.

  The women of the LIS painted the walls of Mama’s hospital waiting room a deep red and raised money for the padded leather benches there. Walking into it was like walking into some expensive womb. It was dark and warm and designed to calm the patient, while she sat, scared, shocked by the betrayals of her own body.

  When patients climbed the stairs to the examination rooms, they
were called to a kind of rebirth. They passed through a hallway painted a deep, peaceful white and emerged onto a floor with wide windows and the white muslin curtains Mama put such stock in. They rose to a world of light. In the bright light, their bodies were not a shame, not a secret, and they were examined by the light of the sun “as the good Lord intended,” as Mama would say. For some of the women, it was the first time they had ever exposed as much as their stomach to the sun, and sometimes they would break into tears, overwhelmed by the light. But even the most conservative of them, the ones who insisted there must be something indecent about all that brightness, came back to Mama and the hospital, to be tended.

  As Mama and Lenore examined them, and I stood back, ready to assist, Mama named each part of a woman as she touched it. “This is your sternum. This is your rib. Here is your navel, but you knew that. Here, what I push on here, is your womb and your ovaries. This is your mons pubis. These are is your labia, minora and major. This is your prepuce. Pardon.”

  I stood in those examination rooms, and I heard her say this every day, to every woman, like a kind of benediction. And when I was not with her in the hospital, when she had me stay at the house to tend the garden or look after the land, sometimes in the middle of the day, I lay in the garden, felt the hot earth on my skin, and contemplated how my own limbs joined together. I traced for myself my sternum, my ribs, my navel, my womb, which I imagined as empty and small as a coin purse, my ovaries, which I could palpate with my own hand, my own mons pubis, my own labia, which I touched and thought the thrill I felt was merely the daring of touching something private in the light of the sun.

  It was so quiet at the house without Mama and Lenore that I listened to my own pulse, could track my own breath, could maybe even hear my own body growing.

  My mother was giving me the great gift that no other Negro girl my age, anywhere on Earth, I am sure, had experienced before. What other Negro girl had the freedom to lie in a garden on a workday afternoon? Because of this, I was not scared or disgusted by my body changing, as I knew other girls were.

  I’m sweating jewels, was how I explained it in my book to the woman in the water. Red rubies in my drawers, yellow pearls at the seams of my blouse, black diamonds across the bridge of my nose. I eagerly wrote to her about the wonderful rude shock that came when I woke up one day and realized that I now smelled like a woman. I will be what Mama knows, what Miss Annie and the LIS know, what we study all day in her hospital, I wrote.

  One day at the house in a planning meeting, as the women talked about how to raise just a hundred more dollars, two hundred, to keep the hospital open, Miss Annie sniffed loudly while I walked by and said, “Womanhood is nothing but tears and sorrow.” Then she looked at me. “I can smell it on you, Black Gal.”

  I was not offended, because I knew Mama saw honor in my changing body—how my measurements grew millimeter by millimeter, how the numbers that described me shifted. She told me she was proud. It was as if the change in my body was one she had willed herself, not the same cycle every other girl went through.

  I think Mama thought if she gave me that space, I would reproduce her spirit and her will in exact measure. Like a cell dividing itself.

  This new world of adult busyness and abundance that Mama was building at the hospital seemed as robust as my own body. I saw them as one and the same—that Mama’s fortunes were changing right when my body was felt like a kind of omen, one I thanked the woman in the water for. I thought she had heard my cries for blood and revenge and was making them real for me, in the sweetest way possible: in Mama’s prosperity.

  I did not even realize that what I had grown into was a different person than my mother until she had colored painted off the hospital sign. She sent for a boy to do it maybe a year and a half after the hospital was open, after the fourth or fifth charity bazaar the LIS had run that came back with diminishing funds. All over the country, colored people were building things that seemed bigger than Mama’s hospital for women, that the colored men and white people preferred to fund.

  The possibilities for colored people seemed so many, so varied, each more fantastic than the last, but which one was right and which one should they choose? If I could have, I would have chosen all of them—every idea, one after the other, seemed correct. A school for freedmen; a letter service to reunite those separated by the auction block; a caravan to Canada; another one to Kansas; Mama’s hospital. Why can’t we have all of it, all of it? I wanted to say.

  The Ladies’ Intelligence Society told Mama they could not raise the money solely for her hospital, in the way that they could during the war. And certainly not solely for a hospital just for colored women, when colored men were back and needed healing more. “We do not like it,” Miss Annie said, “but we think people will be more amenable to your cause if we raise money for you and other things.”

  Mama did not even bat an eye. She only nodded, once, and said, “Well, then.”

  And so Mama decided to change the hospital name. “It’s a sign of the reconciliation, of the harmony of the times we now live in,” Mama said to me and Lenore as we stood beside her, looking up at the boy on his ladder in the street. “Here it is, only two years after the end of the war, and white women will sit side by side colored women in our hospital waiting room, willing to be treated because they know, deep down, their organs are the same.”

  But I knew, and she knew, this was not true. Because after the boy came down off his ladder, she had him put a rod up on the waiting room ceiling, and then she instructed Lenore to hang a scrap of red velvet on it, to make a little curtain, so that the new patients she admitted, the white women, could pull the curtain shut and avoid the sight of colored women beside them.

  The white women came because Mama was colored but not too colored. In fact, her color worked in her favor. She would never be invited to a dinner party, or a lecture, or sit across from them in a private club. They would never run into her in their worlds and be reminded of their most embarrassing ailments: a stubborn and treacherous womb, smelly fluids, bodies insisting on being rude and offensive. Mama could restore these women’s bodies back to what they wished them to be, make them well enough to join this world again—and they would never encounter her in their real lives, this woman who knew exactly what was beneath their skirts.

  The first time I touched one of these new white-woman patients, she flinched. I remember, she was only a few years older than me, a young bride who’d come in with thrush between her legs, too embarrassed to see her own doctor and be found out. Found out of what? I wrote to my woman in the water.

  I grasped the white woman’s elbow to help her to the examination table, which she did not mind, and then I began to feel at her middle, as Mama had instructed at the start of the appointment, and she batted my hands away. “Off me,” she said. And when Mama looked up, from where she was standing in the corner, preparing for the examination, the woman said, “Your girl is molesting me.”

  And Mama, my brave mama, did not come to my aid. She only narrowed her eyes slightly, and then she said, “Come take notes, Libertie,” and she herself went to touch the woman’s middle.

  And so I understood. Mama was light enough that the white women did not feel awkward when her hands touched them. Mama, to them, was not all the way black. When the black women they knew outside the hospital touched the white women, they touched them with what they told themselves to be dumb hands. They did not have to imagine those hands as belonging to anyone, least of all someone thinking and feeling. But I’d touched that white woman with a knowing of what was deepest inside her, and she’d recoiled—it was beyond her imagination.

  After that, I noticed how the white-woman patients watched me while I assisted Mama. They stared at where my dress tightened on my chest, at the roundness of my arms, at where my skirt darted at my hips—stared openly, because they knew I would not rebuke them—and then they would sigh, exasperated, and look away.

  The older ones, I could understand th
eir jealousy—the jealousy of age for youth, I thought it was. Dried up corncobs, I wrote of them in my never-ending letter to the woman in the water. But the patients about my age, I did not understand. I had grown up free, only around colored people, and I could not fathom their scrutiny.

  And Mama chose them over me, every time.

  When the women flinched, when they scowled at my body, Mama ignored them. Sometimes, she said, “Come stand here, Libertie,” so that I was out of their eyesight. But Mama, dear Mama, my fierce Mama, never told them to stop.

  Mama acted as though the white women’s pain was the same as ours. As if when they cried, they grieved for the same things lost that we did. Mama did not seem to mind that a woman who came to our waiting room and sat on the other side of the velvet curtain could not be comfortable. Even when she came at her most vulnerable, when she had to be vigilant for some sort of abuse, she had to stare at that velvet curtain and wonder if on the other side of it was the very white woman who had caused her pain to begin with.

  How, when the world was splitting wide open for colored women, could Mama choose to yoke herself to the very white ones who often were trying to sew it all up for us? “There’s prudence and practicality, and then there is a complete failure of imagination,” Miss Annie said shortly after Mama took colored off her sign, and that was all any self-respecting member of the LIS allowed themselves to say in front of me.

  There was no drawn-out fight. The women in the group did not argue that way. Instead, one Sunday at church, our pew was empty, except for us. No one gathered around Mama’s seat as soon as the sermon was over, as they had when we were plotting. We were back to the same loneliness we’d lived in after Ben Daisy. Mama had squandered every good feeling those women had ever mustered for her.

  I saw Mama raise her hand to Miss Annie, and Miss Annie raise hers back limply and then turn to one of the other women she was talking to. I saw Mama register this, set back her shoulders, turn, and say, “Home, Libertie. I’m too tired for socializing today.”