She gave up co-conspirators for customers, I wrote to my woman.
“What does it feel like?” I asked Mama one Sunday as we walked back home from church.
She looked at me, startled. “What do you mean?”
What does it feel like to lose your friends? is what I wanted to ask, but I knew it was an impossibly cruel question. So I only said, “What does it feel like to heal someone?”
But this, too, was a mistake, because my mother looked ahead and said, “I’ve never thought about it, Libertie. I don’t know that I can answer.”
How could she?
How could she?
It was the rhythm I walked to all the way to our house, up the steps of our porch to the front door.
I stood in the parlor and watched Mama unpin her bonnet until I could not take it anymore. “How can you treat those white women,” I said, “after what you’ve seen them and their husbands do to the people who came to us? They marked our houses for destruction not three years ago, and you welcome them as if it was nothing. All the blood and sweat you mopped up for years, the bones we set right. All the people we lost—”
“You are so young, Libertie,” she said. It infuriated me. “The world is bigger than you think.” She was still watching her reflection in the parlor mirror.
I tried to meet her eyes, but I couldn’t. I looked at the glass jar with her sister’s braids in it, untouched since Ben Daisy—no one brave enough to touch it since he left us.
No, Mama, I wanted to say. The world can live in the palm of my hand. The world is in the burning between the thighs of the colored women who seek you out for comfort. The world is in the wounds on the heads of the fathers, and in the eyes we treated, burnt by smoke from the fires the white mobs set.
I can measure the world. Can you?
But I didn’t have the courage to say that. I lowered my eyes. For a time.
“I’ve raised you wrong,” Mama said to her reflection. “I’ve raised you all wrong if some white folks being cruel is a surprise to you.”
I felt my face go hot with anger again. “I am not surprised by the cruelty, Mama,” I said. “I am surprised we are expected to ignore it, to never mention it, to swim in it as if it’s the oily, smelly harbor water the boys dive into by the wharves.”
Mama finally took off her bonnet and set it down. She turned to me, her eyes exacting. “You want to write poetry?” she said. “Or do you want to get things done?”
“I want a clean pool to swim in.”
She snorted. “Always with the flowery talk. You’re spoiled.”
“Call me spoiled,” I said. “I won’t rot if I swim in clean water, though.”
She picked up her bonnet and folded it tighter in her hands, her only sign of distress.
She said with a sigh, “You are becoming too old for these scenes, Libertie. You can keep asking me your questions, your accusations full of God knows what. But the answer is never going to change. And I am tired.” She set the bonnet down again, crossed the room as if to leave.
“But I am tired,” I called after her, wanting to make her feel something, wanting to make her react, feel the same slippery sense of unease I’d felt when I saw that our pews were empty and that our friends had left us. “I am very, very tired, Mama. I am tired of bending over women’s stomachs, and I am tired of feeling for babies’ limbs under skin, and I am tired of smelling the sickroom breath of women who won’t even look me in the eye.”
Mama stopped at the door and turned. “If you are tired at sixteen years old, you understand how tired I am of having this argument with you. You can do as you please. But I won’t have this discussion anymore.”
And she left, calling over her shoulder, “Put the kettle on will you? A cup of tea would be nice.”
I sat down in the parlor, in the seat in the corner where I’d watched my mother plan and plot and scheme and heal. Where I’d loved her and wanted only her understanding. I sat there for a long time, as the room darkened around me, as I heard her move about upstairs in her regular ambulations. I had my little book in my lap, full of notes to my woman in the water, but I could not write now. I saw my own handwriting, childish and looping large, and I thought of what she would think if she saw it, and I imagined she would feel only disgust with me, what I imagined was the same disgust my mother felt now, walking about her office, setting things right for the workday tomorrow. Mama had fled into her mind, away from me—and I should be used to the cold by now, I should, but I still could not bear it.
It was a question of good. I had never doubted before that Mama was good. But here she was, discounting everything I asked in exchange for the money of these women, for the sake of the gold lettering on her building downtown. I could not, in all conscientiousness, call that righteous or good.
I am a fool, and maybe you are, too, I wrote in the book, and then I closed it, and sat back, and cried.
The next morning, we rode into downtown as if nothing had happened—Mama telling me the tasks ahead. Indeed, it felt worse to know that our reckoning had not even been a reckoning for her, it seemed, just a slight annoyance at the end of the day. Here was another break between us. She could not even see when we were at odds with each other.
I thought it had not affected her at all, until a few weeks later when she looked up from her books as I brought her a cup of tea one night and said, her voice cool but her face blushing slightly, “Cunningham College in Ohio has accepted you for further studies. I think it’s for the best, don’t you? I have taught you all I can here.” She took off her glasses and smiled wanly at me. “I think I cannot teach you anymore.”
I did not even protest. I said nothing and understood I was to leave her, had been banished, for wishing her to ask more of the world around us.
Se lè yon sous seche, moun konn valè dlo
It’s when the spring goes dry that people appreciate the value of water
She sent me away, so I’d send her away, too, I resolved. I would banish her from the very recesses of my heart, from my consciousness, to forge a new self that had not ever been touched by my mother.
In the weeks leading up to my departure, she did not speak to me of it at all. It was Lenore who directed how to pack my trunk, told me what route I should travel, reminded me to never look a strange man in the eye. Mama went about her work as if I would be there with her forever.
So she wants silence, I wrote to the lady. I’ll give her the silence of the grave.
On the morning I left, she told Lenore to take me to the ferry to Manhattan. “I should stay at the hospital,” she said. But as I climbed into the cart, she stopped and held my hand and kissed it, in that same desperate way I’d seen her do to Madame Elizabeth.
“You write to me, you hear?” she said, her voice strangled. “You write to me everything that happens to you so I can know it.”
I kept my hand in hers for as long as I could. Let me stay with you, and I wouldn’t have to write anything at all, is what I wished to say. But I only said, “Yes, Mama.”
And then she threw my hand away, and the silence rose up between us again, as inevitable and heavy as an ocean’s wave.
Dear Mama,
The train was tolerable. The stagecoach was not. I had to sit on the top, at the back, because at first I was the only Negro traveling and there was a white family, moving to Ohio. The wife did not want me to sit beside her or her children. But after the first stop, a Negro man and his son joined me. The man was named Mr. Jonathan, and he taught me how to press my body forward into the wind. He said it was the best way to endure the ride. He told me I have a habit of looking back over my shoulder at the road behind us, and that is no good when you are traveling through open country.
The land here is strange. I find it all too flat. Not like the hills in Kings County. The air, though—that, I can concede, is better. The first few days out of New York, my nose dripped a thin black liquid that made the coachman laugh. He told me it was all the soot of the city, fleeing
my nostrils. I must confess, I bunched my cloak into the balls of my hands and rubbed my nose at his rudeness.
The stagecoach left me in a town called Butterfield, and the college is five miles farther than that. There was one cart waiting to make a mill run, luckily, that agreed to take us—otherwise I would have walked the five miles, pulling the twenty pounds of clothing and quilts and books in my trunk behind me.
On the ride into school, I sat beside two other girls, one plump, one stout, both with skin the color of damp sand. The thin one leaned in to all three of us and said, “At night, you can’t see nothing in these fields. You, for instance, out in those fields you’d be nothing but eyes and teeth.”
I knew it was a joke, but when I heard it, it shot through me and I spent the rest of the ride turning suddenly, trying to catch, out of the corner of my eye, glimmers of teeth and eyes from the fields. Or maybe just another girl as dark as me who folded down into molars and corneas as soon as the sun set.
I will stop myself from speculating further. I know you do not like poetry. I will write another letter to you when I’ve gathered enough facts, not just impressions, for your liking.
Your
Libertie
I had resolved to wash her influence off me like dust from the road. But everything in that place she’d banished me to looked to me exactly like Mama. The gray sky that arched above me was the same color as her front tooth, and the fields smelled like the inside of her shawl, and the wind in the trees, I thought, sounded just like the whisper of her voice when she was being urgent.
The cart stopped a quarter of a mile before it reached campus, in front of a wide, low log cabin, set back a little, with a short, rough-hewn fence in the front.
As I headed up the path in the dusk, my trunk trailing behind me, the door opened. A woman stood there. When I reached her, I realized she was shorter than me—the top of her kerchief only came up to my shoulder. She was almost as dark as me, too. She looked up at me, laughed at my dirt-smeared face. “You look like you walked here from Brooklyn,” she said.
She came out behind me and pushed me inside. “Leave the trunk,” she said. “One of the boys will get it.”
This was where I was to board—the home of an old friend of Mama’s, Franklin Grady. He was from Kings County, too, and had moved out west to study law at Cunningham College, run for over twenty years by abolitionists, an experiment in Negro education. The woman who greeted me was Grady’s wife, Madeline.
Grady had been there since before the war, since the days of spiriting away, and now that war was over and there were so many ways for a Negro to get ahead, he had chosen to stay at the college, to become its first Negro dean of law. Indeed, as Mama had told me, all the teachers were Negroes—drawn out to these fields to grow the teachers and doctors and farmers and lawyers our race would need in freedom.
I realized that Mama had sent me to a place that was the antithesis of her hospital. There would be no white students behind a velvet curtain in the classrooms of Cunningham College, claiming reconciliation. But Mama also knew, as did I, that I couldn’t get away with the trick she’d pulled so many years ago—register at a white medical school and be taken for merely a white woman, not a colored one, until first semester marks came through.
The Grady household was not like mine. There were three rooms—the big front one, with the hearth, the back room, where Grady, Madeline, and the three children slept, and then a smaller room, where Mr. Grady’s books were kept and where he went to work on the cases that came his way. The main room was hot. Hanging from the ceiling, draped over every beam and surface, were skirts and shirts and pants. Enough clothing for a regiment. “Keep looking,” Madeline Grady said as I craned my neck up to stare at the ceiling beams through the leg hole of a pair of bloomers. “They’ll be here till Wednesday.”
Then she moved off, out the door to the yard, where more clothing hung out to dry.
She did not ask me to follow her, and I was at a loss as to what to do, so I sat down on my trunk and waited, while the two boys who were supposed to help me drag it in stood in front of me and stared. “Hello,” I said, and they both ran off with a start to hold on to their mother.
Mrs. Grady came back in to the room and began to pull down some of the skirts and shirts and throw them over her arm. I moved to help, but she held up her hand. “There’ll be time enough for that once you’re properly settled in. Sit still. Play at being a lady,” she said, and then laughed again.
I stayed on the trunk, awkwardly. When she came back in again, she pushed one of the boys forward, who held out a branch he’d broken off from the oak tree out front.
“Well, take it, then. Beat the dust out you, at least,” Mrs. Grady said.
When Grady came home, that’s what I was doing—hitting my knees and ankles until the dust from the road danced in the air. I was the only one to greet him, because Mrs. Grady and the boys were back outside, wringing the last of the gray water out of strangers’ shirts.
Grady blinked at me once, twice. His cheeks flushed pink in the heat of the room—he was, perhaps, a little bit darker than Mama, and much, much lighter than his wife. But he was also clearly a Negro—he would not have been able to get by. He was short, too, with a round, pleasant face decorated with freckles and a broad, friendly nose, across the bridge of which perched the same small spectacles that Mama always wore.
When he saw me, though, he frowned as if I was a misplaced book.
“That’s the girl, Libertie,” Mrs. Grady called from the yard, and Grady grunted in response.
Later, at dinner, I told him, “Mama says thank you for your hospitality, and I do, as well,” but he only managed to mumble a reply into his soup.
“She’s asked me to give you this,” I said, and I handed him the small pamphlet on prayer by Reverend Harland that our church had commissioned to be printed to celebrate the end of the war.
“Well, go on. Thank her,” Mrs. Grady said. Let your own pickaninnies learn good grace.” That made him smile, slightly.
He glanced at the title, then read it aloud. the glory of tomorrow it said in proud, correct letters.
“Mama doesn’t like that,” I said. “She says it assumes too much.”
“Huh,” Grady said. “Well, Cathy never did put too much stock in forecasting.”
“I, for one, agree with her on that,” Mrs. Grady said to her bowl of soup.
“But you know Reverend Harland,” I said. “He just refuses to respond to any of Mama’s hints about unseemliness.”
I blushed then, unsure if I had offended Grady with my irreverence.
He said nothing, only picked up the pamphlet carefully and carried it back to the room the rest of the family respected as his study.
It was to always be like that. He rarely stayed in a room when I entered. At first, I was sure the awkwardness would dissipate. Before I’d left home, the gossips at church had told me that Grady had been my mother’s sweetheart before she met my father. So I was curious to meet him, to see if he could explain her to me, tell me what she had been like when she was young and gay, before she’d become this woman I could not understand. But it was perhaps this past connection that made Grady wary of me.
And so, to learn about him, I was forced to watch his wife.
I could not determine what about her made her the reason Grady had never come back to Kings County but instead had chosen a place with fields full of eyes and teeth. Madeline Grady was nothing like my mother. She liked to gossip and she liked to sing loudly, off-tune. She told me once, sighing, that if she had to spend another night at the college listening to lectures about the Negro condition, she would maybe yawn so wide she’d swallow her own nose.
That first night, she watched me as I put my Bible and my anatomy book—the two books I had managed to pack—under the pillow next to the mess of blankets she’d set up for me by the hearth. “Lord,” she said, fanning the pages with her thumb, “imagine reading all of this. Sometimes I wonder.”
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“Oh,” I said, understanding what she meant. And then I decided to be brave. “I could teach you,” I told her shyly.
She shook her head. “I said ‘sometimes,’ girl. Not all the time.” She laughed. “Grady reads enough for both of us.”
I lay on the cooling hearthstones and wondered. Just that night, before we all retired to bed, Grady had read from their family Bible and Mrs. Grady had sat beside him, a child on her knee, patting in time to the cadence of the words. But she does not wish to read them for herself? I thought. It was even more strange to me because at the college, though I had yet to meet them, I knew there were women who had scrimped and saved and walked a thousand miles to be able to read a book. There were women Madeline Grady’s age who stayed up late each night to learn the alphabet. And here she slept beside a man who not only read books but wrote them. And she’d never rolled over in bed and said, “Teach me.”
I stopped myself from thinking further then—it was bad enough that I could hear, in the dark, the whole family shifting and sighing and passing gas in the next room. I did not have to imagine the Gradys’ marital bed. But still, it was as if Grady and his wife lived in a kind of willed blindness.
I thought, I have never seen a more incurious woman. I thought, My mother is better than Madeline Grady, at least. I thought I was better, too.
Grady and his wife had married late, and their children were much younger than I was. They had a girl and two boys still in short pants. Grady, in contrast to his gruff indifference to my presence, doted on the boys and girl. He was always reaching for them—running his hand over the clipped scalps of the boys or suddenly squeezing the fat of the little girl’s knees. I had never seen, up close, a family with a father, and whenever Grady made one of his sudden attacks of affection, I felt my cheeks burn and I had to turn my eyes away because they stung, as if a glare from the sun had suddenly caught them. I could not shake the feeling that I was seeing something I was not supposed to see.
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