Louisa saw the coffins first, and she reached for Experience’s hand. I think Experience would have spit at me if she could have.
Madame Elizabeth stood in the center of her shop and watched them. “I did not take you girls for being superstitious. I know you are good Christians and you know the only haint is the Holy Spirit.”
She had three coffins stacked alongside the shop’s dusty brick wall—a large one, for men, a slightly smaller one, for women, and then the smallest one, for children, stacked at the very top. The room was divided between coffins and dresses—on the left, the stacked coffins, on the right, a headless, armless torso in a long muslin skirt, horsehair blooming out of its stitched shoulders, and a table scattered with bolts of cloth.
Madame Elizabeth had us sit at the hearth that straddled both sides, to recover.
“Lord, but you must be busy,” she said to me.
“Yes, I suppose,” I said.
“A full year of studies done. I am sure you are tired.” She smiled and held my gaze.
I shook my head and looked into the fire. “But is Mama well?” I said. And then, “She seems to have aid in her new pupil—”
“Emmanuel, yes.” Madame Elizabeth nodded. “A fine boy, from a good family. He and Lucien were the best of friends, before they left for Haiti. He is very handsome, too.” She directed this to Experience, the lightest of us. I had forgotten how color-conscious Madame Elizabeth was. Experience, realizing she was the intended recipient of this information, blushed and cleared her throat.
“Yes, Emmanuel’s all right,” Lucien said. He had been sitting by the coffins, wiping one of them down with a rag, and had been watching the Graces with a smile that was not altogether kind. “I wish Emmanuel’d stayed down here with us. It would have made my life less dull.”
Madame Elizabeth laughed. “More like you would have gotten into more trouble than you already do.”
“So you see,” I said, “Mama has no need of word from me.”
“Oh, Libertie,” Madame Elizabeth said, “you’re a smart girl. You know you’d whip him in any contest. Especially after a full year at school. You do not ever have to worry of being crowded out of her affections. You are too old to be jealous of a person you’ve not even met.”
I glanced over at Louisa, who was following the whole conversation with interest. Only Experience had the thoughtfulness to look away, embarrassed. She stared at the fire, working to suppress one more yawn, then stood up suddenly. “I fear, Madame Elizabeth, that we must retire,” she said very carefully, in a low tone she used when she was speaking to older people.
They stood and embraced Madame Elizabeth, who stayed in her chair, and waved to Lucien. Then they were gone.
I turned in my chair and made a show of asking Lucien about himself.
He had remained as pleasant-looking as he had been ten years earlier, and I realized, with a start, that he was lightly flirting with me, though it seemed to be more for the amusement of his mother, I realized, then any sort of genuine interest. He made his jokes and verbal flips loud enough for her to hear and when one was finished, looked sideways for her approval. Madame Elizabeth would sally him on with a tap of her fan or a pull at her shawl.
In one of his moments of joking, he called me “Black Gal,” and I shivered.
“Do you remember?” I said. “Do you remember Mr. Ben?”
“Oh, Daisy!” Lucien cried in a nasal falsetto, and then fluttered his hands. “But of course.”
Madame Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. “That poor man.”
“Do you ever wonder what happened to Daisy?”
“If there’s any justice in the world,” Madame Elizabeth said, “her soul’s repented for all the pain she caused that man.”
“But how is it Daisy’s fault,” I said, “if Ben Daisy was the one who chose to die for her?”
“Well, listen to you, Miss Libertie,” Lucien said. His eyes shifted between me and his mother, sizing each of us up.
Madame Elizabeth tilted her head and held her finger to her chin, a practiced pose of concentration. Then she said, “Love is a mysterious thing, and a gift. A woman is a keeper of love, and when she does not take that duty as sacred, then things like that happen.”
Lucien sighed. “You lose your mind and end up trying to make love to a river.”
“You are terrible,” I said.
“Glug, glug, glug,” Lucien replied, and I saw, from the way his mother held in her laugh, that the joke was not a gamble.
I stood up. “I should go to bed, as well, Madame Elizabeth.”
“Ah,” Lucien said, “we’ve made you mad.”
“Lucien, stop it.” Madame Elizabeth held up her arms, and I stepped awkwardly toward her. “Good night. And say your prayers for your mama and me.” Her breath was murky with the smell of tea and sugar.
Madame Elizabeth and her family lived above the shop. The stairway to get to their rooms was clammy, built into the brick of the house. At the top of the stairs was a short hallway, dim, with only one cramped window at the end, which faced out onto the street. I hadn’t taken a light with me upstairs, and Madame Elizabeth had not offered one, so I moved along the hallway, my fingers running along the doors. I counted, one, two, three—Madame Elizabeth had said the third room was where we should sleep. I reached for the doorknob and turned it and pushed, but the door would not move.
I tried again, turning the knob back and forth, the iron becoming sweaty in the heat of my hand. I thought for sure Experience or Louisa would rise to let me in, but there was nothing. I scratched at the panel. “Louisa,” I called. “Experience.” Still no reply.
I held my ear to the door and heard the faintest shuffle, as if someone in bare feet was moving carefully. Then I bent down to the keyhole to look through. There was no candle, only the very faint moonlight from the window in the room. I could see nothing, really. But suddenly I heard someone on the other side of the door gasp, as if she had been holding her breath for a long time. I blinked once, twice. And then, again, nothing.
I stood up from the keyhole. And I think, then, that I knew. I looked at the doorknob in my hand, shook it idly, almost forlornly, one more time, and then felt my hand along the hallway wall until I was back at the cold staircase, and then down to Madame Elizabeth and Lucien at the fire. The two of them had resumed work on a cape, spread out before them at the table. Madame Elizabeth looked up, six pins between her lips, while Lucien stood beside her with a line to measure stretched between his hands.
“They were already asleep,” I said, not sure how else to explain myself. “And I shouldn’t wake them. It’s been so long since they’ve slept in a bed. They need as much rest as possible before their performance.”
Madame Elizabeth looked back at her work. “Well,” she said, her voice muffled by the pins, “sit by the fire for a bit, and then you may sleep here if you wish.”
And so that was where I fell asleep that night, listening to the hum of heavy scissors cutting through damask.
That sigh behind a closed door in the dark was a song I had never heard either of them sing before. It was the same song I heard, sometimes, while lying on the hearth of the Gradys’ home, many hours after everyone in the house had gone to bed. When I’d heard it there, I had instinctively pulled my blanket tighter around my head, hummed what songs I could remember from rehearsal, and, sometimes, resorted to clearing my throat loudly, to make it stop.
But I had not wanted to make whatever was behind that door quit. I had only felt a pang of longing. I had never wanted to know something so badly in my life. Not even when I saw Mama make a dead man walk, not even when I stared at the river for a lost lady, had I ever wanted to know something as much as I wanted the knowledge of what, exactly, Louisa and Experience were doing—no, not what they were doing, but what they were feeling—behind that locked door. Longing to know what had caused that smallest, sweetest of sighs made me shut my eyes tight as Lucien and his mother lazily quarreled about the best way to at
tack the fabric before them.
When Louisa had said that home was in Experience’s arms, and when she had defended Experience from every call questioning her coldness … they had been traveling to another country, I realized. They had lived there all along, while I stayed a citizen of this one, a land without sighs.
Mama, before I had left for college, had made oblique mention of what could happen to girls in school—“Girls, when they are left on their own, they become each other’s sweethearts sometimes”—but she had told it to me as something her white-lady patients sometimes fretted about, and for me, she made it clear, it was only another possible distraction to avoid on my way toward greatness. She had not suggested it could be like this. A closed door with a mystery behind it that I could never know.
Up until then, I had told myself that my disgrace at Cunningham College was a blessing. I’d thought I could endeavor to make this trip with the Graces into a permanent state of being—I could become their manager, writing to the respectable colored ladies of the North and finding drawing rooms and church floors and forest clearings where the Graces could sing. The three of us would never have to return to the place of my shame—we could indefinitely live in the admiration of colored women who would otherwise have scorned me for the failure I had become.
I did not see how that was possible now. Because in my fantasy, Louisa and Experience would stay with me always, would never leave me—we would travel together; there would be no secrets between us. And eventually, with a long enough proximity, I would understand the covenant between them and enter into it on my own.
But there was no room for me there. Perhaps that was what I had been responding to in their voices all along—their desire. As wide as their desire was, it could not make room for me. I knew that. It was a bride song, a song for twin souls, for one mate to call to another. And I, a fool, had mistaken it for a song of federation.
And so I was alone again. On the wrong side of a locked door. An interloper in what I had been so certain would someday be my country.
We were to take the train to New York for the last part of our journey—Lucien and Madame Elizabeth accompanying us. We left early the next morning—Experience’s cheeks flushing red at the sight of me, cramped in the same chair, by the fire, but Louisa looked up at me through her lashes and said, “You should have knocked louder, for us to hear you.”
She was so bold that, for a moment, I thought that I was mistaken, but I noticed that as she said this, her fingers trembled, and so I only nodded and looked away.
The train used to have mixed seating, but at the station we discovered it had a newly implemented car solely for colored passengers. Lucien wanted to contest it—“I’ll speak to the porter,” he said, but Madame Elizabeth waved her fan.
“I am tired,” she said, and Lucien fell back beside her, willing himself to swallow all of it.
Experience and Louisa tried to smooth over the ride by telling Madame Elizabeth how comfortable a train was, compared to a stagecoach—even Experience made an effort to say something merry, though all four of us were watching as something slowly ate Lucien up from the inside. He would not look at any of us, only at the country that rushed by the open window.
He seemed to recover by the time we reached New York. I had not written to my mother directly, had arranged for the LIS to welcome Experience and Louisa at the church. But when we arrived, there was my mother, standing among the group of women, looking almost hopeful.
A year and a half away, I had not forgotten her face, but I was shocked by the changes to it. Her hair was not as bright—it was fainter— not yet given over to gray but closer to it than when I had left. And when I stepped close to her, I saw that her face was threaded with a thousand little lines of worry. As I embraced her, I heard Madeline Grady’s instruction: You’ve got to press the memory out.
Even her embrace felt different—my mother’s arms were not a place I knew well, but in my recollections of them, her arms had always been heavy and strong. They felt lighter now, and her skin, where it touched mine, felt soft.
Is Mama ill? I remember thinking for one terrible moment, but then realized, with a shock, the truth was more awful. I had not noticed her age when we were together. But seeing her, after we were apart, all her years on this Earth came down between us.
I pulled away.
“We have missed you,” she said. And then she looked over my shoulder expectantly. “Is this your great cause, then?”
“Miss Louisa and Miss Experience,” I said. I saw Louisa quickly reach for Experience’s hand and then drop it as they moved forward to greet my mother.
“Libertie speaks so much about you,” Louisa said.
“And this,” my mother said, “is Monsieur Emmanuel Chase.”
He was only a little bit taller than Mama. This is the first thing I remember noticing about him. He had been there this whole time while I embraced her, just back behind her elbow, but I had not noticed him in the excitement of reunion.
He held out his hand, the other tucked behind his back, the model of a gentleman.
I took it.
He was most nearly white—Mama had been modest when she said he could get by. He was even lighter than she was. His hair was fine, but balding at the temples, narrowing back into a widow’s peak, the rest of it slicked back with oil, though curling at the bottoms. His eyes were deep and wide-set and black, and his mouth was thin. This was because he sucked his lips in whenever his mouth was relaxed, a habit his mother had switched into him. When his mouth was allowed to fully rest, as it did in sleep, his lips were as full as any of ours, fuller even than my own. His mother beat him because his lips were, in her imagination, the only sign that he was a Negro. Holding them in or letting them loose was a choice between life and death, she believed. But I would only learn this from him later, when I lay close enough to trace his mouth’s outline for myself, with my little finger.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, and then he turned and said the same to Experience and Louisa. He had a trace of an accent, I assumed it was French, and this made him sound even more distinguished. I felt a pang of acknowledgment, that this was the person my mother had chosen to relish instead of me. And, of course, shame with myself, that I had proven my mother’s doubts correct, that she was right to bring him in when she thought I might not see my schooling through. And underneath it, running as high and bright as a mountain stream, a longing that Emmanuel Chase should think well of me, which I hated myself for even wishing.
Lucien rushed forward to embrace him and slap him on the back. It was the masculine version of the hundred little flatteries he had directed my way to make his mother laugh, though now he seemed to have forgotten her entirely, focused only on Emmanuel Chase.
“Long time, old boy. Too long, old boy. What a sight, old boy,” Lucien said, his voice curving up into an approximation of a gentleman—different from the voice he’d used on me and Experience and Louisa.
To which Emmanuel Chase only said, “Yes.”
And for that, I felt another pang, that Emmanuel Chase was very politely making a fool out of Lucien in public, a pastime I had liked to do myself as a child. But my jibes had never landed, because Lucien had never cared what I thought of him.
At the house, Lenore played much cooler than my mother had. She said, “Oh, look, a ghost,” when she saw me, forcing me to accost her with apologies and swears of devotion until she grudgingly accepted my embrace.
The house was full then, for once, in the evening, with Mama, Lenore, myself, the Graces, Madame Elizabeth, Lucien, and Emmanuel Chase, who, I noticed as we all sat down to dinner together, had taken the head of the table. Mama sat to his right.
“There won’t be much time to rest,” Mama said, “before you must begin preparations for the performance.”
“The Graces can rest here during the day,” I said. “I’ve already volunteered for the LIS.” I waved my hands, a flourish, in front of me. “Behold, a mule.”
This made Mama laugh, at least. Lucien, too, though Emmanuel Chase only smiled and kept his face close to his plate.
“And you must tell us,” Mama said, “how your studies are faring and what the college is like and, oh, how are Mr. Grady and his wife doing?”
I had expected this, and I had a dodge—what I had learned from so many years as a doctor’s daughter. That nobody wished to speak of any greater subject than themselves. So I turned to Emmanuel Chase and said, trying to keep the envy and the fear of him from my voice, “My studies are boring, but a doctor all the way from Haiti, that is much more fascinating. Mama has spoken of your talents, but she has not mentioned much of your history.”
Emmanuel Chase laid down his knife and fork, as if he was about to make a speech. I thought, At least I have guessed right about you. You are vainglorious.
“My father was born free here, in Maryland, and my mother was a slave. She escaped twice, to join him—the first time, she and my three brothers were recaptured; the second time, she made it away, but with only one of them. In Maryland, she and my father had five more children—I am the youngest. My father joined the Church of England. They do not have much of a presence in Maryland, but their faith is strong.
“Even before war broke out, he wished to leave this country, but my mother would not hear of it—she wished to stay, in case my two brothers ever found a way to return to her. But my father could not see how colored people could make anything of ourselves here. He petitioned the church to send him to Haiti—the president there had promised land to any American Negro who could come. And my father was determined.
“Right before the diocese agreed to send him, we got word that my two other brothers had died—one of a whipping, from an overseer in Mississippi, and the other drowned while trying to cross the Delaware River. So we left, certain we would miss nothing back here. We left the same day war broke out at Fort Sumter, though we did not learn of it until we arrived in Haiti.”
Emmanuel Chase spoke as if he had practiced this speech many times in his head and had warmed to telling it. He paused for breath, for gasps, for admiring sighs, and Madame Elizabeth and the Graces humored him. I noticed, though, that he seemed to take their noises as genuine—he was not so savvy as to realize that these were the sounds women learn to make to keep men talking. I thought, again, I know you. And I widened my eyes as he spoke, made my smile slightly bigger. Then an extraordinary thing: as he finished his first speech, as he said “arrived in Haiti,” he raised his eyes to look in mine, as if to say I know you, too.
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