I looked to Experience, who shrugged. “They get to keep their costumes when it’s over, don’t they? Tears are a small price to pay for a new dress.”
I’d laughed. “You are both hard women.”
But I was not laughing while Louisa and Experience stayed at my mother’s house, preparing their voices for the performance, and I stood in the church, six little girls lined up in front of me, four of them already weeping.
I grabbed the hot hand of the girl closest to me. “That’s Caroline,” Miss Annie called as I pulled the girl out of the church, past the graveyard, to the copse of trees where Ben Daisy used to wait for his love.
Now the little girl Caroline stood before me in tears. “Stay here,” I ordered. I tried to be stern, but this only made her cry harder.
I knelt down and touched her shoulder. “You must know it’s just for play? You won’t really marry anyone. You just have to wear a pretty dress and walk down the aisle.” Then, “Look, look here.” I squeezed her hand once, then dropped it quickly and stepped ten paces away from her, until I was out of the trees, nearly to the graveyard’s gate.
“Watch me, Caroline,” I called. “This is all you have to do.”
And then I counted to myself—one, two, three—and took the exaggerated steps of a march to where Caroline, skeptical, stood in the shade. I held my head up and twisted my face into a grin, which, I realized, probably frightened her more.
“You walk and smile,” I said through clenched teeth. “Walk and smile, and then you get to the front and bow your head and wait, and when everyone claps, it’s over, and we give you sweets and flowers.”
“That is precisely how marriage works,” I heard from the set of trees, and there was Emmanuel Chase.
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly that. Flowers and sweets. So what is the point of carrying on?”
“I don’t want to marry Daniel,” Caroline said. She had stopped crying and was watching us both with interest.
“It’s the same as when you play with your sister or your friends,” I said. “It’s not real.”
“That’s not very kind to Daniel,” Emmanuel said. “His heart will be broken.”
Caroline looked at me uncertainly, her eyes threatening more tears.
“You confuse her for the sake of a joke,” I said.
It had been all well and good to try to flirt with Emmanuel at night, while looking up at my window, my mother a few feet away. But it was less appealing here, in the woods, with only a six-year-old as witness.
Emmanuel Chase knelt down and said with great ceremony, for my benefit, “Listen closely to Miss Libertie.” Then he stood up and smiled at me.
It was strange, to see the way Caroline looked at Emmanuel Chase—it was pure adoration, mixed with a little bit of fear. “Go on,” he said to her, and Caroline closed her eyes and began to march, her knees raised to her chest, her arms stretched out in front of her, lurching toward me where I stood at the edge of the circle of trees.
When she reached me, she opened her eyes, her arms still held out as if she was balancing a great weight, and whispered, in a voice loud enough for him to hear, though she didn’t wish it, “Is the white man still watching us?”
I lightly slapped her arms down. “Dr. Chase is a Negro, just like you,” I said.
She looked at him over her shoulder again, to make sure, which he laughed at.
“Now walk back,” I said, “slower. You do not have to lift your knees as high. March on my clap. And go slow.”
When she reached Emmanuel Chase, he looked at her awkwardly, then reached out, turned her around by the shoulders, and sent her back to me.
So we did this a few times, sending Caroline back and forth between us, sometimes watching each other, until she grew tired. “I know it,” she insisted. “I know it now. Let me be.”
She did her slow, lurching march all the way back to the church, and then Emmanuel and I were alone together. By then, the shadows of the trees had grown long enough to reach me where I stood. I allowed myself to feel the cold for a moment, then stepped back into the sun. He followed.
We stood there, both looking at the church. Today, there were no props for him to play with. He looked almost nervous. It pleased me to imagine that I made him nervous. He raised one hand to his temple and then dropped it just as suddenly.
“I have thought a lot about what you told me,” I said, to break the silence. He looked relieved.
“It really is remarkable,” he said.
“This is where I used to play with Ben Daisy when I was a girl. But still, I don’t know anything about the gods you talked about.”
“Well,” he said, “not many of us here do. But in Haiti, everyone knows them.”
“Even the Christians?”
“Everyone’s a good Christian in Haiti.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s possible to be many things at once, Libertie.”
I walked a little farther into the warmer part of the grass.
“You like riddles,” I said.
“It’s not a riddle. It’s like the marriage you’ll officiate.”
“Another riddle,” I said. “You aren’t doing much to convince me.”
“But it is,” he said. It had caught his imagination now, and he turned toward me, eager to talk. “When a man and woman marry, they become one, correct? One being bound together, but two very separate people. They remain separate, but act and work as one, for the better of all.”
“You are very modern,” I said, laughing. “A woman remains separate from a man? She’s not swallowed in him, whole, to replace that missing rib?”
I had found my rhythm with him now, I thought. I understood now why Madeline Grady teased so much. It made it easier to talk to a man if you pretended everything they said to you was false.
But Emmanuel Chase was hard to understand, because sometimes he became very earnest. As now. He reached out to catch at the tallest cattail and broke it off, then tossed it away, impatient. “I believe in companionate marriage,” he said, rather proudly.
“So you are very modern.”
“It is only logical that a man and wife should share friendship and charity and understanding. They should be friends for life.”
This embarrassed me, and so I looked away. “That’s where my father is buried,” I said, pointing at the grave. freedom stood out on it, as stark as ever, but his name had worn down, no longer deep in the stone but risen faint to the surface. “I do not know if it was that way between my mother and father, though it makes me sad to think she lost not only her husband but her closest friend.”
“It is a pity. A house needs a man and a woman to function.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “We did just fine.”
He smiled, as if he disagreed but was too polite to say, and I felt a rush of sympathy for my mother, a wish to defend her.
“Was it like that with your parents?” I asked. “Were they companions?”
He didn’t turn from my father’s grave. “No,” he said. “They were nothing of the sort.”
And then he was silent, and we listened to the wind move over the grass and, behind us, an exasperated Miss Annie telling the children to quiet.
I was too embarrassed to ask him more. And he did not seem to want to relieve the silence; he stood in it as if it was the most comfortable place to be. Finally, I could not stop myself.
“Is it strange,” I said, “being here in America, after so long away?”
“Everything is grayer. I had forgotten that. The trees, the clothing, the people’s faces. Even the sun is grayer here than it is there.”
“Is it so beautiful there?”
“It’s a better world there,” he said. “Or it will be. Very soon.”
“You’re not a patriot anymore.”
“I am not as optimistic as Lucien or your mother,” he said.
I looked up finally. He was staring at me again. “I never thought of my mother as an op
timist.”
“She is only that,” he said. “What other word would you use to describe a colored woman who has so thoroughly decided to work with whites, who trusts the white women who come into her office telling tales about hurt spleens, but won’t trust me to touch those same women with my bare hands?”
“They used to ask me to turn to the wall,” I said, “when she was examining them. Mama said it was because they were jealous, that I was young and they were not any longer.”
“I could understand that,” he said.
He said, “When you blush, your skin glows darker somehow. It’s remarkable.”
“It should not be.”
“You don’t find this place changed, since you’ve been away?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I missed it, I thought. It was mostly just—different. But now I am not sure I can call it home.”
“Is that why you are now an impresario?”
“You can make fun if you’d like. I’ve never found anything truer in this world than Louisa and Experience singing. And the one thing my mother taught me, above all, is to fight for truth when you find it.”
“That’s very pretty.”
“You are making fun again.”
“No, it is very pretty. But also not true.”
It was a thrill to hear someone outwardly doubt my mother. I had never heard it before, and a part of me leapt to him as he said it.
“She’s taught you so many good things, though,” he continued. “You probably got a better medical education as a child than I have now.”
“I am not a very good student,” I ventured. I almost told him right then, that I was disgraced. But then he said, “Oh, I find that very hard to believe,” and I thought perhaps we were back in the language of flirtation, with no place for truth.
I wished I could be whatever it was that he saw when I stood before him. It was clearly not the same person that the Graces saw, or Alma Curtis or Madeline Grady, or even who Mama saw, when she looked at me. He looked at me as if I was a wondrous being, as if my voice was a song, as if I was magic. And I did not want to disappoint him.
By then, the sun had shifted, and we were on the cold side of the field again. He held out his arm to me, and I took it, and he walked me back toward the road, toward my mother’s house.
“You are not at the hospital,” I said. “Why?”
“It’s too nice a day to be indoors.” And then glanced at me. “Good, you don’t believe me. I told your mother I wished to work on some notes back at the house, and when I was on the way there, I was lucky enough to see you and the little girl in the field. A happy coincidence.”
“My mother lets you come and go.”
“I’m not a servant here,” he said, sounding offended, which seemed strange to me.
“She never did with me,” I said. “I could only leave the clinic for errands. She said if I got too used to wandering off on my own, it would break my concentration. She knew it took me so long to work it up.”
“So you were a servant then. The little scullery maid, forced to become a doctor.”
“It was not so bad,” I said. “If you were a girl given to that work.”
We walked on a bit longer in silence. Then I took a breath. “Has my mother told you how she taught herself anatomy? When she was a girl my age, there was a cholera outbreak downtown. She followed the gravediggers for a day, until she found a baby’s body, asked for it, and took it to her father’s barn to dissect. She did it because they wouldn’t let her work with the cadavers.”
I am not sure why I told him this, this secret my mother kept. It was a story she did not even trust to Lenore, and only told me when my dedication waned, when she suspected I would not work hard enough, to shock me into diligence. It had worked, but I had told no one since.
Now I looked over at Emmanuel Chase. I had told him, too, to shock him, to see if it could shake that look off his face. But he was saying nothing, only looking back at me, as if what I had said was perfectly normal, as if he’d expected no less from me or from her. So I took an even deeper breath, and told him my greatest secret.
“I am not so passionate as my mother,” I said. “I could not do something like that.”
He nodded, and then he let his hand brush against mine and took it in his. We kept going like that, hand in hand, not speaking, only looking at the road laid out before us until we could see the turn for my mother’s house. Then he squeezed my hand once and tossed it away from him. I thought, in this new language we were building together, that maybe it meant he believed I was passionate after all.
“Good afternoon, then, Libertie,” he said. And he turned to go back the way we’d come.
I was at the front door again, but I could not bring myself to go in.
I had admired my mother, in her ability to use the people around her for greater good: the baby in the bush; Mr. Ben and his delusions; the matrons who funded her hospital. I had thought myself a coward that I could not do the same. I had burnt in anger at a physics of the world that my mother took as given. And even in that anger, I had failed to do anything, had been disgraced as a student. I was no one’s promise.
But Dr. Emmanuel Chase still thought me good. Or, at least, thought of me as someone to admire. Mama had made it clear my anger was useless, unbecoming, superfluous in this world. But anger looked marvelous on Dr. Chase. It gave him a conviction, a heaviness, that he would not have had if he was sweet, if he was asked to be as polite as I was. He would be my avatar.
Through him, I could taste righteousness.
And he understood me. I thought.
To choose him would be to hurt my mother in a way I was not even sure of yet. I knew it would make a wound. I did not know then how deep, or how lasting.
I had been a success in something after all, and there were too many people to fit into the church alone. The children would marry in the copse of trees, which we hung with garlands of flowers. Colored people came from Manhattan, from Jersey, from Long Island. Some even came up from Philadelphia, on the word of Lucien and Madame Elizabeth. The whole thing had turned into a kind of homecoming for the older people, some of whom had not seen one another since the war ended, who cried as they embraced, who walked together arm in arm, who stopped to whisper to one another or sometimes draw back to laugh at some change in fortune.
Sometimes, when I looked up from wiping a child’s nose, I saw my mother in the crowd. She was on the arm of Madame Elizabeth, and the two of them were always in the midst of at least five other ladies. None of the former members of the LIS—that was not to be. But a few women stood gravely beside her as she spoke, and only allowed themselves to smile when Madame Elizabeth broke in and interrupted her.
Suddenly, Mama looked up and caught my eye, and I looked away. I crushed the purse at my side, just to hear the crinkle of a piece of paper there. It was a note, slipped under my door that morning in the small span of time between the Graces leaving the bed and when I turned over in sleep. The note was addressed to Erzulie, and it had been written in a hand I had not seen before but had known immediately who it belonged to.
“You need to say ‘dearly beloved,’” I told Chester, the boy we had picked to play minister.
He looked up at me and twisted his face into a scowl.
“You need to at least try raising your hand at them,” Emmanuel Chase called.
I raised my hand half-heartedly, but the boy had already jerked his arm free, and now he ran.
“You showed him your bluff,” Emmanuel Chase said as he came closer. “You’re too kind.”
“You would not call me kind if you knew me.”
“But I do know you, or at least the most important part of you,” he said. “You are my Erzulie. You’re the lover, never the fighter.”
“You are very presumptuous.”
“I know you,” he repeated, still smiling. I wished he would repeat it forever.
I looked away from him, back out to the crowd. My mother still stood
with her group of ladies, but she was turned toward us, watching.
“You cannot send notes like you wrote to me this morning,” I said. I knew she couldn’t hear us from where she stood—no one could have—but I dropped my voice anyways.
“I only write the truth.”
“You should understand, I am not as sophisticated as you. I’ve only been from my mother’s garden to her waiting room and back again. The only other place I know is the inside of an anatomy hall. I do not know the world like you do. You won’t find a very satisfying game with me.”
“You think I’m false.”
“I think you are not hearing what I am saying.”
“You’ve mistaken me if you think I only tease you. I wrote it to you, but I’d say it out loud to anyone here who’d ask. I’d say it even without their asking. You wish me to ask your mother now?” he said, and he turned as if to walk toward her.
I knew enough, at least, that in the next beat of the game I was supposed to grab his arm and stop him and laugh. But I stood with my arms at my sides and did nothing.
He turned on his heel and smiled wider. “You called my bluff.”
“I do not understand you,” I said. “You write declarations of love and marriage on the back of a scrap of paper I may not even see, and slip it under my door like an assassin, and then tell me your intentions are pure.”
“So you read it,” he said, “and it’s true. I love and adore you, and wish you would be my wife. And you want to know if my intentions are good. I think that tells me all that I was hoping.”
“I do not like games like this,” I said.
Then I raised my voice to its normal tone. “We are about to begin. Excuse me.”
It is a strange thing, to see something you have imagined over and over again finally acted out in front of you. It is almost like a kind of death, a loss of something, that the thing is not as you had thought it would be. I myself had laid out a path of pine needles, brown and dry in the July heat, from the end of the copse of trees to the stump of the altar. I watched Caroline shuffle down it, almost tripping over the hem of her too-long dress, to the little boy we’d chosen for her groom, who was looking not at Caroline or at the spectators who laughed and called out encouragement, but above him, at a cardinal in a branch of a tree.
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