“It makes it easier to sing for them,” Experience said, “when you think of it that way.”
“My mama made it a point to never comment on another woman’s beauty, or lack thereof,” I said, and this made them both laugh, though I wasn’t sure why.
It was the same way when they sang. They looked each other in the eye, and it seemed like they always kept their gaze like that. Nothing broke it. It was deeper than whatever was stitched across that musty quilt in the dining room. It was the same connection that exists between a flower and a bee, between a river and its bank, between a muscle and a bone.
And it was because of that I thought perhaps they were right and Mama and Mrs. Grady were wrong, and something turned over again inside me, some resolve that pushed me away from Mama a little bit more.
I did not go home for winter term, so my grades were given to me directly to mail to my mother, which I did not do. I was close to failing—not quite, but close, and I took the letter with this message and pressed it into my old anatomy book and put it at the bottom of my trunk, resolved to think about it when I could get the sound of the Graces out of my head.
Over the Christmas break, the snow was so high we did not have mail for many weeks, so that when my mother’s letters came, there were five of them to read in a row, and each one, every single one, was filled with the addition of a new name: Emmanuel.
He is a student of homeopathy, recently graduated from a medical school in Philadelphia. He is eager to study under anyone, including, he says, myself, “though you are a woman” (ha).
It was only one pair of parentheses, but Mama may as well have written me in dried berry juice. What did this “ha” mean, from a woman who I knew would bristle at a dismissal like that? A woman who had never been fond of parentheses.
Madame Elizabeth has sent him to me—he is lately of the city of Jacmel, Haiti, before he came to America to study medicine. He was not able to find a doctor who suited his interests in that city. So Madame Elizabeth and the church who sponsored him have sent him here, and he has been a welcome addition to the practice.
He sleeps in your bedroom—he has found it most comfortable. He has also suggested a new way to organize the garden—we will try it come this spring.
He recently saw one of our most persistent cases, Mrs. Cookstone, the judge’s wife, who lives on Pineapple Street. She was resistant that a colored man should treat her, but Emmanuel is able to get by. He is a high yellow homme de couleur (as Emmanuel is known back home in Haiti, he tells us). She relented once she saw him. She agreed that he should consult with her from behind a sheet. Lenore conducted the actual physical exam, and Emmanuel asked questions.
As you remember, Mrs. Cookstone is a bit of a nervous case, but she has written already to tell me that under Emmanuel’s care, she already is quite recovered from the pain in her chest and is even able to walk in her garden now, for a few hundred paces without needing to sit down and rest.
And here, the letter continued, enumerating all the ways this Emmanuel was a wonder.
Emmanuel has brought with him an album … He is collecting all of the plants and wildlife of Haiti, and we spend evenings comparing the plant life of his homeland to that of Kings County.
Emmanuel has created a tea that sweetens the breath, which we are now able to offer our wealthier patients. Sales have boosted clinic revenues by 2 percent alone this month.
Emmanuel is an especial favorite of our child patients and has a light touch with even the most fearful ones.
I counted each time she wrote that name. I knew enough that it was ridiculous to be jealous of a name on paper, but I could not help it, though I dared not mention it to Madeline Grady—or Experience and Louisa.
Mrs. Cookstone is now complaining of a pain in her calf muscle, which she says she also feels in her left shoulder. Emmanuel has already prescribed something that has done wonders, but I’m wondering if you can guess what it was.
This was even worse, to be set against a rival I could not even see, in a race I was no longer particularly interested in but, because of pride, I could not abandon. She wrote of Emmanuel with the voice of a proud mother. She praised him in a way she had never praised me—except for that one time, so long ago, when Mr. Ben first came to us and she had stroked my cheek and said, “Libertie is beautiful.”
But she had never called me clever, or smart, or good with patients, or even particularly hardworking.
Now when she sent me problems to solve, she would write, Emmanuel has already found the answer, but I wonder if you can.
She did not send me cutouts from journals anymore, because Emmanuel has asked to study them and add to his own collection. She would send them to me when he was done.
Can you feel brotherly jealousy for a man you have never met? A figment of your imagination, a ghost of your mother’s convictions? I did. I could not even store her letters in my chest, beside my list of grades—I felt that somehow the letters would whisper to one another, and my mother would instinctively know, back home in Brooklyn, how close I was to failing.
I spent that spring more in the music room than the library again, until, as the days began to lengthen, Louisa and Experience fell into a bitter disagreement.
A dean had suggested to the two of them that perhaps they should sing spirituals, that they should add these songs to their repertoire and then make a show of performing them.
Louisa and Experience had already brought in a little money for the fundraising efforts of the school with their singing. The songs they sang were German and Italian pieces—they prided themselves on this. They did not sing hymns, and they did not sing the songs we knew from church, or those our parents and grandparents and lost ones sang to keep from crying. The songs we’d all once sung in the fields. The songs that our parents sang at night or with one another, that we still sang now, even in freedom. No, in public, Louisa and Experience only sang in a foreign tongue, about springtime and love and offering apples to your beloved. But the college suggested they could raise more money if they sang the slave songs.
“There’s that college out in Tennessee that’s done it,” Louisa said, worrying the cloth of her skirt. “And they’ve sung to the Queen of England.”
Indeed, we’d heard of those singers and even tried to see them when it was reported that they were playing in Cincinnati. We’d even started out to make the long journey to hear them, but we’d turned around after half a day when the stationmaster told us it was not the real Jubilee Singers but a fraudulent group—four men and a girl who couldn’t harmonize and made a mockery of not knowing the words.
“The group from Tennessee sang pain for the Queen,” Experience said, in that strange hollow way she had, and this stopped both me and Louisa from speaking further as we tried to understand what she meant.
“They say the Queen gave them an ovation,” Louisa countered. “She invited them to her palace, and they dined with lords and ladies.” Even when she was impassioned, Louisa made everything she was saying sound like a joke, so I laughed at this.
But Experience shook her head. “I won’t sing my sorrow for anyone,” she said.
And then she blew her pitch pipe, to bring Louisa back to the music.
“She’s stubborn, is all,” Louisa explained to me, later. “She’s thinking of herself and not of what can be done with what we have.”
She took my arm in hers. We were crossing the square of dirt. The college president spoke to us all the time of the grass to go there—bright and healthy and cut short and orderly. Every Sunday sermon ended with his invocation of this future time, when the college and the men and women there would be so prosperous, so abundant, they would have a whole mess of earth that grew grass solely for strolling in, which no animal would eat from.
In the meantime, a few of the women students had sprinkled sunflower seeds around the grounds the previous summer, and now, in the spring, we could see the battered stalks poking up still here and there through the muddy snow.
> “She’s not thinking of all that singing could do for us,” Louisa said, kicking at the flower roots.
“That’s what you would do if the Queen said she’d give you a stack of coins to sing your pain?”
I was teasing, but Louisa stopped and looked at me gravely—one of the few times I ever saw her stop joking.
“Before I came here, I slept in the corncrib and I saw my mother and brothers sold. I sang for each one when they left me, but that’s my own song, and I wouldn’t sing it for a queen of anything. But this is the only home I have had or will ever have on this Earth. You can’t just throw away a home. You do whatever you can to keep it.” And then she took my arm again and walked me the rest of the road to the Gradys’.
There was a coldness between Louisa and Experience after that, and I saw them once, from afar, Experience loping a few feet in front of Louisa across the field, Louisa trotting to keep up. They sang together, but had stopped speaking, and it was awful to feel the silence returning, the silence coming back in, and I tried to think of something to make it stop.
I was not sure how to convince Experience. I knew my own mother didn’t sing those songs. Her father did not pass them on to her. I only learned them from the women at the LIS, who sang them before, during, and after each meeting, who sang them to keep time as we did some tedious task, like piecing together the stitching in a quilt or rolling bandages. Sometimes, I sang the songs to myself with the words changed, to help me remember all the parts of a body—the names of bones and muscles and organs. I took a certain satisfaction in fitting those phrases into the loop of songs, the songs of work, the songs that made an art out of burden. But to say that to either Louisa or Experience, I knew, was a kind of insult.
It was a few weeks later when the women’s dean, Alma Curtis, asked to meet with me. She tapped on my shoulder as I sat and ate in the whispered companionability of the dining hall.
“Stay behind, Miss Sampson, if you will.”
Alma Curtis was a broad-shouldered woman of forty-five or fifty—back then, I thought of her as old. She was the only married woman who taught at the college. Just the year before, before I had come, she had married the college president, Thomas Curtis. After they had said their vows in the campus chapel and pressed their hands in front of the minister, Alma Curtis had dropped to one knee and bent her head, and requested, in front of the entire college, her husband’s permission to continue her career. And President Curtis had raised her up, cupped his hands underneath her elbows, standing her steady, and said, “Of course.”
Louisa and Experience had repeated this story often—it was always whispered when Alma Curtis walked by.
I had asked, “But how long did he wait to say yes?”
Louisa had blinked. “What do you mean?”
“Did he agree right away? Or did he make her wait?” I thought of a long silence in the hall, Alma Curtis holding her breath while her husband decided her fate, the flowers on the wedding bower shivering around them. And then I laughed. “It sure was clever of her, to ask for permission in front of a crowd like that.”
I had meant it in an admiring way. I had thought, What a slick woman! in the same way that, back home, Lenore applauded the barn cats when one of them swiped the biggest fish head.
But Louisa had looked at me coolly. “What a cynic you are,” she had said. “I happen to find it romantic.”
So I had learned another rule I had gotten wrong, and every time I looked at Alma Curtis, I tried to imagine her as an agent of romance—invisible cherubs and steadfast ivy curling around her everywhere she went. Which was difficult to think of, because Alma Curtis’s broad, jaundiced, straightforward face seemed to discourage anything like that.
I thought of this as I sat at the table, watching the other girls work together to clear the plates and food. When the room was nearly empty, when it had gone from quiet to silent, Alma Curtis sat on the bench across from me.
“We must discuss your performance, Libertie,” she said with unbearable kindness. “The other deans, they were hesitant to take on a young lady in the men’s course. They were not sure if she would be able to keep up. But your mother assured us, we were all assured, that you were capable. I personally intervened with President Curtis and asked that you be placed in the men’s course. And your work, when you turn it in, is passable. So, then, what is distracting you?”
I could not exactly answer. I could only swallow and say, “I am unsure. If you would give me more time. Perhaps it is being so far from home.”
She said, “You spend an awful lot of time in the music room.”
We let this sit between us for a moment.
“Yes. Yes. You see …” I licked my lips, readying for the lie. “You see, I’ve come to a sort of conclusion.”
Alma Curtis looked at me skeptically.
“The Graces—that is, Louisa and Experience—they mentioned that President Curtis wished for them to found a chorale. In the mode of the Jubilee Singers in Tennessee.”
“Yes,” she said. “I am aware.”
“And Miss Experience,” I said. I figured the formal address would help my cause. “Miss Experience was uncertain about performing the slave songs for a different audience. For our white friends.”
Alma Curtis looked unconvinced.
“She says she would feel distressed,” I said, “to sing the slave songs in front of them.”
Alma Curtis sighed again and under her breath said, “These young people.”
“So …” I wet my lip. “So I have been formulating an idea. A compromise of sorts. That they could perform in Brooklyn, for the colored people there. I know that the women’s groups are planning many celebrations for the summer. We could raise some good money. I could organize it. My mother has friends in Philadelphia and Boston who would gladly support. It would be a kind of jubilee.”
Alma Curtis blew out a breath.
“If anything,” I said, “it would help convince them that performing is possible. And then, perhaps, they would not be so shy of mixed company.”
The dean sat back for a moment. “This is what’s been distracting you?”
“I very much love this college,” I said, “and wish to aid in any way that I can.”
Alma Curtis shook her head. “You may love it,” she said, “but I have come to tell you that you cannot return next year. We do not have a place for you.”
I searched her face to see if she might regret it, if she might leave me an opening to argue. But there was nothing, not even pity, not even sympathy. Just resolve.
She patted my hand, and then she stood up, shook out her skirts, and walked away.
“For colored people,” I said to Louisa and Experience later that day. “The women’s club my mother founded will organize a benefit, and you two will be the stars. Louisa, we can raise the money for your home. And, Experience, you will not have to sing your pain for anyone else but people who already know it.”
“If these colored ladies are so rich,” Experience said, “why can they not just give the money to the college? Why do we have to sing for them?”
Louisa snorted. “Can’t get nothing without giving nothing. Anyone knows that.”
“They’ll raise more if it’s a celebration,” I said. “A talented duet all the way from Ohio? If it is new people in town, we can get our friends from Jersey and from outside the city to come. It will be a whole celebration. You’ll see.”
I talked so much and promised so much that I found, by the end of the night, that I had made myself out to be some sort of impresario and not a failure. I spoke and felt my mouth form these lies, my tongue wet with them. I could hear the desperation in my voice. I was certain they would doubt me.
But Louisa was smiling again, and Experience had allowed Louisa to hold her hand, and so it seemed they believed me, after all.
There was no time to feel shame. There was only the beat of blood in my ears as I spoke faster and faster.
At the Gradys’ that night, when M
adeline Grady had pulled herself and her children and her husband into their bed a few feet from me, I lay on the stones that had been my resting place for nearly a year and pulled a stranger’s cotton stocking up to my mouth and screamed the song I had been trying to sing, falsely, all these months. The song of my anger and my sadness, the song that I knew I could never sing in front of the Graces—I did not want them to disown me. I sang it for myself only: a thin, high thing, ugly and satisfying. I sang till my throat was raw and dry, and white flashed before my eyes, till I was panting. And then I lay back on my stones and told myself I felt lighter.
Dear Libertie,
You have only written me of music and nothing of your studies. Miss Annie tells me that you are planning, with the ladies of the old LIS, a concert in the summer—I would wish to know about it. I hope you will tell me of it when you come to stay.
Emmanuel is eager to hear of it, as well. I fear he grows bored here, out in the country, as it is. But he does not wish to go downtown and he rarely travels to Manhattan.
I am most excited for you two to meet. I think you will find him an excellent brother in study. He is so levelheaded, so calm, so persevering, that it is impossible not to wish to work as he does.
It is strange to have someone in the house who is not you, who is not my daughter.
I am eager to welcome you here, to your home, to where you belong, before you leave me again for your studies.
I hope this is not a sign that my Libertie is leaving me behind.
Your
Mother
Di m’ sa ou renmen, epi m’ava di ou ki moun ou ye
Tell me what you love and I will tell you who you are
I had not counted on the Graces’ fear of death. By the time we reached Philadelphia on our journey back east, we had slept in the barns and sheds and church pews of smaller towns, and I’d thought they would be happy for real beds in the city, which Madame Elizabeth had promised we would find in her home.
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