Libertie

by Kaitlyn Greenidge

  Being in Grady and Madeline’s house, I remembered the silence of my mother’s. All those evenings spent where the only sound was her breath as she sighed over her reading, and sometimes the surprise of a log breaking into fire in the hearth, and here, at the Gradys’, there was noise always around and within us. I realized that I had been raised up in something like a shroud, the muffling shroud of my mother’s grief—for my father and maybe for life. To be at the Gradys’ meant I was faced with life, and sometimes it felt like too much for my ears and my heart.

  I would have written to my woman, if I could. But the Gradys’ house did not have the long stretches of privacy that living with Mama did. There was no place to hide away and write verses. No ground to lie on and build myself anew. Those first few days, overwhelmed by the thunder of Madeline Grady pouring water into tin tubs, I found a corner of the front room and sat, facing the wall, the shroud of other people’s laundry providing a cover. I had my book in my lap, my pen in my hand, when the youngest Grady toddled over and placed her chubby hands on my knees over and over again, until I put the paper aside to play with her.

  The little girl tumbled away, satisfied. Through the piles of dirty petticoats, as I sat alone in the corner, I could hear Madeline Grady teaching her children her trade.

  “Grady says a boy isn’t ready for a proper education till he’s seven,” she’d told me that first day, “but it’s never too early to learn to press.”

  “You’ve got to press the memory out of ’em,” she told the children, who stood back in a circle, frightened of the heat, as she laid out each shirt and pulled the wrinkles out of the cloth. I heard the thud of the iron, the creak of the cotton, and I closed my eyes. When classes started, I told myself, I would be pressed clean at Cunningham—the wrinkles of my mother’s passivity and stunted ideas smoothed out of me.

  As Mrs. Grady worked, the room filled with the smell of other people’s sweat, and she said, “Lord, it’d wake the dead.”

  She said this constantly about her work and did not wait to hear a laugh in response, but I provided one, because I wasn’t sure what else to do. She teased Grady all the time, and he seemed to enjoy it. But for me … should I laugh at each one? Should I stay serious and ignore her? Should I add my own? She had a freedom I had never seen before. The freedom to laugh. Mama would have dismissed her for that. I felt myself doing the same, but then stopped.

  The point of an education was to learn to do better, wasn’t it?

  Dear Libertie,

  I trust you are finding the Gradys’ home comfortable. I do not know what you mean when you say I do not approve of poetry. I am eager to hear of where you live now.

  You did not ask about the hospital. It is doing very well. We are busier than ever, and Lenore has asked me to hire a girl to help her, now that you are gone. We have so many patients I fear we may have to turn some away. I have written to Madame Elizabeth for advice. Reverend Harland has suggested that we stop serving unmarried women, and that we cannot do, as you know.

  Miss Annie put on a wonderful concert last Sunday, all the children singing truly beautifully. I went downtown to hear the most interesting lecture on botany—I have included a clip, describing what was said, from the Eagle. I have also been twice to the theater the past few weeks—a very good Macbeth and then something very silly that a patient told me all the girls go to see. I enjoyed both—even the sillier show, I think. I suspect you would have, as well.

  Please write as soon as classes begin.

  Your

  Mother

  My anger had retreated in the face of my confusion at this new place, but now it came back, in such a rush that it made the letter tremble in my hand. I read it and read again—astonished. I read only for her cruelty then, not her longing. Her longing, I thought in a blaze of fury, was irrelevant and probably false.

  There was no theater that admitted colored patrons downtown, so she had passed, as easily as that, to see her Macbeth and her silly play, in order to be able to talk more directly with her patients. A feat she would not have dared if I had been home and at her side. I crumpled the page up, tore it into smaller and smaller pieces, threw them into the wind as I walked to the Gradys’ door.

  I cannot not share myself with her, I told myself. My hand trembled again, slightly, at the memory of the strength of her hand holding mine. Write me so I know where you are.

  But if she did not want my rage, which part of me did she wish to know the location of?

  Dear Mama,

  The college has remarkably progressed in the twenty years since its founding. I know you would be very proud of what the race has been able to accomplish here, what Negro men and women have been able to build when we take care of our own.

  When the college began, classes were held in an abandoned barn on a stretch of land that the ten founders saved and schemed to buy. Over the years, they have saved to erect, one by one, additional buildings, so that today there is a lecture hall as fine as anything in Brooklyn, complete with old logs set up as columns. Beside each log is a chisel, and the male students, when they have an idle moment, drive the chisels into the wood, to flute the columns and make them truly Ionic. They are already half done.

  There is a small chapel, used in shifts on Sundays, since it is the only colored church for many miles. People come from all over, not only the students, to worship there. There is a full brick building set up as the main hall, and another building where some of the students and teachers eat and sleep. It is all arranged around a bald square of dirt that will soon sprout grass and be the campus common. The agriculture students tend to it each day. Past the square and four buildings is the road into town, and then only the fields. At night, the lanterns in the windows of the college are the only light for many miles.

  The college is run under the strict belief that silence is a sign of great intellect. Work begins at 5 a.m.—the boarders are expected to wake and wash, and then most of the students are assigned duties to keep the campus running. The young men clear brush, chop wood, construct outbuildings, and grow the small field of wheat and the market plots down near the river. The girls clean the campus, launder, and cook the food for all faculty and students. I am exempt, as a day student. But every day, as I walk from the Gradys’ to class, I pass my classmates bent over in the fields.

  The oddest thing is that we are expected to even do hard labor in silence. No one is allowed to sing any of the songs we all know to make work go faster. If anyone starts the melody to make work not so weary, he is dismissed from his post and sent to work alone in the woodshed.

  It is a very queer custom, one that makes the campus dreary, in my opinion, though everyone else does not seem to think so. When chores are over, the campus erupts into chatter, and people laugh and talk again, as if nothing had happened.

  Love

  Dear

  Libertie,

  Silence is a virtue, and it is good that you learn this now. I am so glad to hear the college is thriving and that you are finding a home there.

  You did not send back any notes on the botany lecture I sent. I suspect they have perhaps passed this letter in the mail, or maybe you are so deep in study you have forgotten to send. Make sure you do when you have a moment. I am curious of your opinion.

  You must also make sure that you are avoiding any strong spices. Does Mrs. Grady cook with onions? It is not healthful for you. Be sure to continue your exercises twice daily—rotate the ankles, flex the wrists—to stay flexible.

  You also must send me your list of classes, the names of your professors, and which books they have asked you to read. I am enclosing three articles from the latest Journal of Homeopathy, and I ask that you write back your analysis of the arguments and your rebuttal, if any, and send to me as soon as you are able.

  Your

  Mother

  I would send her nothing. I had nothing to give her except petty rebellions like this.

  The other girl students were all assigned to the courses for
teaching. They were taking the ladies’ course of study, which was concerned with how to best direct a class. I was the only woman in the men’s course, the only girl taking biology and chemistry and rhetoric.

  In lecture, I sat at the front, a bit to the side, at a separate desk. The men all sat on rows of benches. I could not pay attention to lectures and take my notes and see them at the same time, but I was aware of them there, behind me. When I’d first walked into the lecture room, I had wrinkled my nose—I had not smelled anything like that before. Not a bad smell, just the heavy murk of young men that was caught up in that hall. It was so overpowering I was not sure if I could even differentiate one man from the other. They were just a cloud of scent, pressing at my back as I tried to sketch the shape of a fibula. I smelled it everywhere on campus, and it made me long for the company of women even more.

  The boys were polite enough—they waved to me at the end of class sometimes. But that was not enough company for me, and I was lonely. I would have tried to befriend the girls as we sat in the dining hall. In that room, though, we spoke only in whispers.

  I learned there was a kind of hierarchy. There were some girls who had stolen themselves away before the war. They were a kind of aristocracy, and they tended to stick together. At meals, they bent their heads and spoke without even looking at one another—they had perfected a way to speak even below whispers, even beyond glances. Sometimes, in their silent language, one of them would communicate something to make another laugh, and it was in those moments that I felt it keenest that they were better than me. Not a single one of them would ever, I guessed, be as wasteful with their time here as I was, sitting at the front of a classroom of men and wondering what they thought of me. Those girls knew something about the world that I did not know, could never know.

  Then there were the freeborn girls like me, from places like Philadelphia and Manhattan and Washington, DC. I should have naturally made friends with them. I heard them tell their histories to one another—their mothers were all, they claimed, “at home”; their fathers were clerks or tobacconists or preachers. No one would claim a mother or father who was a servant. It was strange since we all knew that each of us must have scrimped and saved to sit at that table. My own mother, in the weeks before I left, set the clinic’s books in front of me and showed me the column she had added for her calculations: Libertie’s Education. But not one girl would admit this fact. Something stopped me from telling them my mother was a doctor. I was not sure how they would respond—eagerness and solicitation seemed somehow worse than scorn. I did not want to still, hundreds of miles away, be relying on Mama for my position. So I chose to keep my distance from them until I could understand any of this better.

  But the truth soon came out, and I began to catch them watching me. I only smiled at them and bowed my head and hurried on. My boldness had burnt away, and the strangeness of the place had engulfed me.

  “You know, every last one of them up there at that college are colorstruck,” Madeline Grady said to me finally, after many nights at home beside her and her children.

  “You’ve never heard of love of copper?” she said. “They’ll love us black ones if we make a lot of noise, but when we keep to ourselves, like you do, they don’t know what to do. But don’t worry. They’re young. You’re a pretty enough girl. One of the boys up there will peel away for you, like my Grady did for me, and leave those yellow girls behind. You just have to let him take his time.”

  And that was another kind of humiliation. That she thought my solitude was a symptom of wanting love.

  So that was it. The perimeter of this world, the one I had tried to escape to, was color. I recalled, with bitterness, that Mrs. Grady did not know how to read, but she sure knew how to count. In this world, the lighter girls were unsure what to make of me—by birth, I should have been their peer. But I was not, somehow, and I was studying to become something closer to a man, not what they understood as ambition.

  I spent a lot of time in the outbuilding that had been newly designated as a library, books piled all around me, not reading a word. Instead, I read the books’ frontpieces. Many had been donated by churches from across the East. There was an entire lot from one congregation in Philadelphia; another from a congregation in Albany, a stack that had the x’s and handprints of a flock in Virginia. I would trace all the names of all these people who believed that I could be part of a bright shining future, but I couldn’t bear to turn the page and begin to read.

  It had been very easy to denounce Mama to her face and call her a traitor in my heart. I’d thought it was painful, but it was the easiest thing in the world compared with sitting here, feeling the weight of my mother’s expectations and the world’s indifference to my failure and my self. Mrs. Grady had taken to calling to me, as I left for class, “Go on, Black Gal, make me proud,” and though I smiled at her each time she said it, knew she meant it with love, I could only hear a lie in her voice.

  My rage at the world returned whenever I sat in that library. I knew what a stronger girl would do—sip her wrath like corn liquor, have it drench her ambition, sweat the rage out her pores as she worked harder and better, be smarter. But instead I suckled my anger like Lenore did the abandoned offspring of the barn cats, and it was about as effective as one of those little animals, doing nothing but mewling and flipping over in distress.

  I knew I was not strong enough to touch a hundred white abdomens while feeling their contempt, while Mama stood beside me saying nothing. I did not think I was strong enough to pretend, even ten years on now, that the sons and husbands and fathers of the white women who sat behind our clinic’s velvet curtain hadn’t marked our houses with red chalk for destruction. And I knew, like the ache of a broken bone that hadn’t been set right, that I was not strong enough to be faced with another Mr. Ben, and to fail him, and to have to live with that failure for the rest of my days.

  I was not strong enough for this world, is what I meant, and it was a low-down, worming thing to discover about yourself when all around you, men and women who had been beaten, scorned, burnt, drowned, still found a way to come to this silence and sit within it and answer questions about what a lung was good for.

  I began to think there must be something wrong with me: that I was slow or stupid, or merely ungrateful. Most of all, I felt a deep, burning shame in the center of my chest, that I could not work my rage better. When Mama was my same age, she had already finished her studies and was submitting herself to examination after examination, to try to enter medical school. She was working, in the evenings, with the local pharmacist, to learn how pills were made, and she was conducting her own experiments, and writing to friends to send the latest medical books to her to study.

  But here I was, with an entire library open to me at midday, and I couldn’t read a word.

  I was only dull, hidden Libertie.

  Dear Libertie,

  You must make sure to ask that the latest anatomy books be found for you. The following is a comprehensive list of authors to trust:

  Dear Mama,

  The college’s library is tolerable. The books have been donated by many kind churches. I’ve read the frontpieces of each and seen books from

  Drs. Henshaw, Borley, Crawley and Madison and Fredricks (the older)

  Ohio, Delaware, Virginia (of course), Connecticut, and even Maine.

  For your review, I present you the following case: A girl came with Adipsia.

  I must say that I miss you, and even Lenore (tell her she’s a busybody), and if I

  She had neither appetite nor thirst, and the thought of food was disgusting.

  could but see you & stand beside you two & hear your voices,

  So, in your professional opinion (ha), my good girl, what would you give

  I would perhaps not be so lonely here, with you, but that’s a silly thing

  as remedy?

  to wish, I know.

  This impotent anger was another kind of grave. I thought I would be buried
in it on campus, until one day when Madeline Grady chased me out of her house and told me to stay at the college for the evening “with the youth your own age.” So one evening, when the dark came sooner, I did not hurry home to the Gradys’ but wandered around campus until a few girls told me to follow them. And that is when I heard it. It was the queerest thing to hear the sound of a piano at night, outside, but I could hear it—the deep tones of the notes and then after it, the whisper of the hammer hitting the strings, because it was an older piano and someone was tuning it.

  Music at night, music after dark, music finding its way to you across sweetgrass, can feel almost like magic.

  A bunch of students, men and women, had gathered in one of the music classrooms, where a slanting upright piano had been pushed against a wall. Standing at it were two women, pushing the keys. It was a student-run affair—the room was decorated with holly and ivy, and there was hot cider, donated by one of the farms, and roasted apples and sugared biscuits. It was so hot that the windows were open to the cold night air, and from where I stood, pressed against one of them, my back stung with cold and the full front of me steamed with discomfort.

  The first to perform was a sleek and chubby boy who had memorized his own dreary poetry—rhyming couplets intended to celebrate the beauty of the seasons but that thumped along forever. Then there was a girl who read a monologue, in the voice of Theda—a scandalous thing. And finally, for wholesomeness’ sake, the Graces.

  And then the two women who had been at the piano stood. Louisa Habit and Experience Northmoor. Louisa sang alto and Experience sang soprano. The two of them singing together, that first night I went out, made a kind of joyful noise—sweeter than what it sounded like when the LIS sang together at home or when the choir sang on Sunday. I watched them as they sang—I could see, under the cloth of their bodices, where their lungs expanded for more air, where they were holding in their stomachs to force out the lighter sound. To watch Experience and Louisa sing was the same as seeing a fast, small boy run or a man swing an ax and break up a tree. It was the same singularity of form and muscle, the same pushing of a body toward a single point on the horizon. I wanted, right then and there, to be as close to them as I possibly could.