Libertie

by Kaitlyn Greenidge

  He paused to take a sip from his cup of water, and I lowered my eyes and kept them down as he continued.

  “So it seemed my father had gambled well, and he was very proud. But, as you can imagine, it was quite a shock for a young boy such as myself to be spirited away from Baltimore to Haiti. The first year there was very hard—my brothers died, as did two of my sisters. Before the year was over, my mother died, too. That left only myself and my sister Ella. And my father, of course.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, but he just blinked and continued.

  “The second year, my father was able to begin to raise funds for his ministry, and our farm there, and so life became a bit easier. My father remains there. I plan to return, as I hope all freeborn men do one day. Perhaps even Lucien will come, if we can tempt him.”

  Lucien looked up, momentarily shocked at this, but he recovered. “Leave Philadelphia for Haiti and the rule of Negroes?” he said, and rolled his eyes.

  Madame Elizabeth laughed and slapped his arm, and I saw Emmanuel Chase’s gaze harden, his lips grow even thinner.

  “It’s where our people’s ambition lies,” he said.

  But Lucien shook his head. “My father’s Haitian, it’s true,” he said, “but I am an American by birth, and I’ll stay here in her land, if I please.”

  “You’d stay here even as they kill us for trying to vote? You’d stay here even as they cut us down in Colfax and in Hamburg?”

  “We’ll fight them back,” Lucien said. “We’ll win in the end. The white men will learn that colored people mean business.”

  “You have too much faith in white folks,” Emmanuel Chase said.

  Lucien said, “You have not enough faith in colored people.”

  “Do you know a story my father used to tell me?” Emmanuel said. “He used to work with a white family just past Baltimore. He would send people their way, when they were escaping. But he had to stop when one of them told them what the white people were doing—inviting slave owners over for dinner and then asking everyone to debate the slave question, together, at the table. Black men, scared and tired and just trying to run, forced to sit and prove how worthy they were to the very men who should have been apologizing to them—”

  “Emmanuel,” Mama said. If it had been me getting angry, Mama would have stopped the whole conversation. She would have tried to drown my rage. But here was only a very quiet “Emmanuel,” which he ignored.

  “You can’t ever be free in a place like that,” he said. “In a house that runs by those rules. I can tell you, no one in Haiti has ever asked for such an indignity. It is our own republic. It’s for colored men such as us.”

  “But they are not Christians,” Experience said. “They are papists.”

  “And cannibals,” Lucien said.

  Emmanuel looked pained, as if Lucien had reached across the table and slapped him. “Your father would let you speak of his country like that?”

  “He is who told me this of his country!” Lucien said. “Colored people are a cursed lot, but at least in our good fortune, we are cursed in the good Christian nation of America, where good government and understanding of God prevail—”

  “You say that as they riot any time we try to sit in a railway car,” Emmanuel said.

  “Those are only potholes on the road to progress. We will prevail. We have the tradition of good Anglo-Saxon law and fairness to guide us. Haiti has none of that. We could go there, I suppose, to raise them up—now, I agree with you on that. As good Christian Negroes, we should act as a mother to our race, to bring it up to manhood.”

  “But there’s still so much to be done here,” Mama said.

  Emmanuel had that pained look again, the one that had creased his face when Lucien called his countrymen cannibals. It momentarily flashed across his face, and then it was gone, suppressed. He looked at Mama with polite interest, though I was beginning to think that underneath, he was burning the same way I did.

  He turned back to Lucien. “None of us will ever triumph,” he said, “until we are completely free.” Emmanuel may have sat at the head of the table, but he would not have dared to say this directly to Mama.

  “But what does freedom mean?” I said. I could not help myself. I had heard something in his voice then that I thought—that I believed, that I flattered myself, that I hoped—was only for me.

  The table stopped to look at me. My mother, I saw, looked the hardest. It was as if she was seeing me for the first time. But all I could think was, I have embarrassed her again. She wishes I was not her daughter, that clever Emmanuel was her son.

  I closed my eyes, wishing I had not spoken.

  “It means,” Emmanuel said, his voice shaking, either from excitement or dread, I could not tell yet, “that we are wholly in charge of our own destiny.”

  “And we seize it, apparently, with violence and blood,” Lucien said, “if we are to follow the Haitian model. That does not sound like freedom to me. Freedom goes hand in hand with peace and harmony and prosperity. But did you ever notice”—he leaned over to Louisa—“how the lightest ones burn brightest for revolution? Why is that?”

  “They’re closest to freedom and can taste it, so they’ll do anything for it,” Louisa said, laughing. She had begun to relax and regain her playfulness.

  Emmanuel Chase laughed along, but he wouldn’t look at her. He only said to Lucien, “Revolution already happened there.”

  “Here, too. Twice,” Lucien replied. “It’s hard work, but we’ll prevail. Colored men will be free. And in the meantime, I don’t have to speak French.”

  “It would give your father great pleasure if you did,” Madame Elizabeth said.

  Lucien slapped his hand on the table. “Mwen se yon American.”

  “I did not know you were such a patriot,” Louisa said.

  “Oh, but I am.” Lucien leaned back in his chair and began to sing the first few verses of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” in the nasal tones of a northerner. “Please join me,” he said.

  Louisa scoffed. “I have a voice to preserve,” she said, which made the whole table laugh, except for Emmanuel, who sat back, quiet.

  It was hard to get a look at him, because every time I glanced at his face he stared back at me.

  My mother declared that the Graces should sleep in my room, with me, and Madame Elizabeth should sleep in her room, with her, leaving Lucien to sleep with Emmanuel in Mama’s old examination room, which Emmanuel would take, now that I was home. As the sleeping arrangements were announced, I watched Louisa and Experience’s faces, closely, but neither one gave anything away. I imagined that they held hands underneath the table, and I felt a rush of sadness. I cupped my own hand, under the lace tablecloth, around empty air, and imagined what it would feel like for another hand to rest there.

  I did not want to be in the room alone with them while we all undressed and pretended that none of us knew what had happened. I didn’t think I could bear to hear any of the excuses they would give for why they had not opened the door at Madame Elizabeth’s. It felt, perhaps, even more lonely-making to know they had not trusted me with the truth. So I made a show of announcing I would sit on the porch for a bit before bed.

  “I missed the garden,” I told my mother.

  Lenore tilted her head. “Leaving home really does change a person,” she said.

  But Mama gave an approving smile and kissed my head before taking her candle and leading Madame Elizabeth off, so that they could gossip in peace in her room.

  I sat on the porch for a bit, listening to the saw of flies all around the house in the night. It felt like the world was still drowsy from the winter, nothing alive out there in the dark was at its full pitch yet. I counted one Mississippi after another, trying to leave enough time for Experience and Louisa. I grew uncertain, though, if I had waited long enough, and so I stood up from the porch and walked out into the yard, trying to see if the candle was still burning in my room upstairs.

  I tilted my head back. I could see
the flare of light, where the flame sat on the windowsill of my room. I sighed, waiting for when the two of them would feign sleep and I could return to lie in my own bed, a stranger among friends.

  “You hold yourself like that and you could swallow the moon.”

  I jerked my head back, and there was Emmanuel Chase, coming down the porch steps to stand with me.

  I think I’d known that it would be this way. I think, if I was being honest, I’d hoped that it would.

  He smiled, pleased with himself for the bit of poetry. “My nurse used to say that to me, when I was little.”

  “A nurse?”

  But he was not flustered. He nodded and drew a very short, fat cigar out of his jacket pocket. He sucked on the end but did not move to light it. Not yet.

  “It is like that in Haiti,” he said. “The better families have servants.”

  “Other Negroes?”

  “The people who live in the country, yes. They’re used to work like that.”

  I blinked.

  “I sound hinkty,” he said.

  “You haven’t forgotten that word, at least, with all the French you speak.”

  “No,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten. Wherever there’s niggers in this world, you need to have a word for uppity.”

  I laughed at that, and he smiled wide again. It was a kind of agreement between us.

  I stepped back to look up at the window again, to hide my excitement. The candle still burnt.

  Emmanuel came to stand beside me and tilted his head back, as well. Then he said, his voice lower, so that no one in the house could hear him,

  “My nurse, we learned to call her Ti Me. It means Little Mother. She would tell me stories about the gods. Haiti has different gods than here. They came from Africa, on the ships with the Negro slaves, and stayed—they did not forsake the Negroes there, like they did the Negroes here. They are always around us there.”

  “You weren’t scared?”

  “No,” he said, still looking up at the window. “My sister was scared and thought it was all heathen nonsense. But I loved them. Ti Me told me a story about the god who has the moon. The goddess. ‘Yon lwa’ is what Ti Me would say. She is called La Sirèn—”

  “Haiti has sirens then? Mermaids, like here?”

  “She lives under the water, yes. She rules the oceans—she is as changeable as a wave.”

  I shivered. “I knew someone once, who used to speak nonsense like that.”

  He sucked on the end of the cigar again, a sound almost like a kiss, which made my stomach lurch.

  “Really?” he said. “So you’ve already heard of La Sirèn, who is so beautiful she takes men underwater with her, who possesses her subjects and makes them walk as though they had fins for legs. And they gasp—oh, they gasp—because they cannot breathe air anymore, and the only way to get them to stop is to douse them with water. I have seen it myself, as a boy, in the temples Ti Me took me to.

  “Sometimes, La Sirèn gets jealous and she’ll drown a man and take him down under and teach him her magic. When he comes back to the surface, his skin is light, as bright as mine, and his hair is straight, and he knows all about the world.”

  “Is that why you look like that, then?”

  He laughed. “But you told me you already knew all about her. That another man has already told you this tale. And who was he?”

  I felt the grass, insistent, on the bottom of my shoes. I felt the calm cold of the night air. “There was a man my mother tried to help. Madame Elizabeth tried to help him, too. He was a funny sort of man—he stole away here before the war. But he couldn’t abide freedom. It was almost as if he couldn’t understand it. That sounds wrong, but that’s how he acted. He said his sweetheart, who had long died, was here with him, that she wore pink and white and loved sweet cakes and that he only wanted to be with her. He became upset when he caught her with three wedding rings on her finger, so he claimed, and he drowned himself in the river. All because he was sick with love and freedom.”

  Even as I said it, I felt a roll in my stomach. I had never given Ben Daisy’s history like that to anyone so plain. To do so felt like a betrayal of Mama, and I half expected her to throw open the house’s front door and stare me down. But the door stayed shut.

  “Ah,” Emmanuel said. “That was not La Sirèn. That was Erzulie Freda. She is the goddess of love, and she is married to the god of the sky, the god of the ocean, and the god of iron. She loves hard and loves beautifully, but she is never satisfied. She ends every day crying for what she has not done, what she cannot have. Your poor man had no chance against her.”

  He hadn’t heard me, I thought. Or he thought my story was part of our dance. Or maybe what I had said about Mr. Ben was too monstrous. Imagine telling a revolutionary like him that freedom made a man sick. I felt a burn of shame at my perversity. I wanted to be better for him. So I did not say, “You misunderstood.” Instead, I said, “I suppose you are correct.”

  The window was still illuminated. As I remembered Ben Daisy, the song I had made up for him came back to me, as loud as the flies drowsing in Mama’s garden.

  When I looked back at Emmanuel, I saw he was watching me, in the light of the moon, with those wide-set, watery eyes. He was still sucking on the end of the cigar.

  “Why haven’t you lit it yet?”

  “You have to taste it first, before you can light it. I brought ten of them from home, and have been trying to ration them.” Then, still looking at me with interest, he said, “I save them for special occasions.”

  I thought, with a flash, of how he had watched my face as he gave his speech at dinner, that silly remark about the moon.

  “There is nothing special about tonight,” I said, despite knowing what he meant.

  “But there is,” he said. “It is very rare that I can meet a devotee of Erzulie herself, this far north, near the waters of a river as cold and muddy as one in Kings County.”

  “So I am a goddess of love, then.”

  “If you insist,” he said.

  It was a game I was no longer sure how to play. To be earnest seemed wrong. I thought of Mrs. Grady’s hectoring. I was not quite up to that, either. Louisa and Experience, they were true with each other. Quick, Libertie, quick, I told myself. Something clever. But all I could say was, “Why are you interested, then?”

  “My father thinks the Haitian gods are demons. He thinks it is his life mission to get every Haitian to Christ and to forget the blasphemies. But I think those gods are our genius. The genius of the Negro people. Our best invention. And Erzulie, the goddess of love, she’s called with honey and flowers and sweet things, and she speaks to the longing, the desire for perfection in this world, and our sorrow that we will never achieve it. And I try to stay close to people who know her.”

  “But none of it is real,” I said. “It was a thing Ben Daisy made up when he couldn’t stand to be here. And I was just a child. That’s why I believed him.”

  Emmanuel Chase finally struck a match and lit his cigar, and the heavy smoke rolled over both of us. “It was real enough to drown the man. I think it is remarkable.”

  It was my turn to speak, my turn to say something fascinating to him, but I could think of nothing. My bedroom window was dark now.

  I only pointed up above, at the moon, just a sliver of white behind a black ribbon of clouds. He followed my gaze. He breathed heavily, and another gust of too-sweet smoke came over us.

  “Good night,” I said.

  “Good night, then, Libertie.”

  Upstairs, at the entrance to my own room, I stood at the door for a minute, my hand on the knob, afraid it wouldn’t turn. But it did, easily enough, and in the dark I could just make out the two rounded forms of the Graces, on opposite sides of the bed, a clear space between them.

  I crawled into the space. Louisa turned and breathed in, then coughed.

  “You smell like a bad man,” she murmured.

  Experience sneezed.

  “It was D
r. Chase’s cigar,” I said, even though I knew she spoke in her sleep. “He smokes in the garden at night. Cigars he has to work up to taste.”

  “Hmm,” Louisa said. Then she turned on her back, away from me. Experience turned in the other direction.

  For a long time, I lay between my two friends’ love, my eyes open in the dark, breathing in the smell of the night curdled with the stink of cigar through the open window, where Emmanuel Chase, I guessed, still stood below, smoking at the moon.

  In those days, in Brooklyn, Tom Thumb weddings were all the rage.

  The prettiest boy and the most docile girl of any Sunday school class would be chosen as the groom and bride. Churchwomen would spend weeks sewing a morning suit for the boy—silk and velvet cut down for a child’s shoulder span. For the girl, a veil and train made comically long, so that she would look even smaller and slighter when she walked to the altar. To act as the reverend, they would ask the child who loved to play the most—one who could ignore his classmates’ tears and keep the gag going with his comical sermon. People paid good money to see them, and to laugh at the children weeping at the altar, unsure if they’d just been yoked to their schoolyard nemesis for life.

  This passion for children’s marriages came on us quick after the war. It was a celebration and an act of defiance and a joke—we could marry legally now, even though we knew our marriages were always real, whether the Constitution said it or not. So real a child could know it, too.

  Louisa had insisted we add one to our benefit.

  “It makes the children cry every time,” I said.

  “We’ll sing ‘Ave Maria’ to drown out their tears,” Louisa said.