When the child minister called out, “You may kiss the bride,” the crowd began to laugh and jeer, but Caroline stepped forward, grasped her boy groom’s head in her hands, and brought his face to hers in a cruel smack, which everyone cheered.
The Graces were to sing in the church, we had decided. But after the wedding was done, Louisa came to me. “We’ll sing here, under the trees, where God and everyone else can hear us.”
So Louisa and Experience stood side by side in front of a crowd of three hundred colored people. They did not look at each other, but before they began, Experience grabbed Louisa’s hand and held it, and did not let go until the songs were over.
The sound they made, with just their two voices marrying in the air, filled the whole clearing.
My Lord,
what a morning
My Lord,
what a morning
Oh, my Lord,
what a morning
When
the
stars
be gin
to
fall
You’ll hear the trumpet sound
To wake the nations underground
Looking to my God’s right hand
When the stars
be gin
to
fall
You’ll hear the sinner moan
To wake the nations underground
Looking to my God’s right hand
When the stars
be gin
to
fall
You’ll hear the Christian shout
To wake the nations underground
Looking to my God’s right hand
When the stars
be gin
to
fall
You read in the Bible about the voice of God shaking leaves and commanding bushes to burst into flame, about trumpets making walls fall, about the songs that can sweep waves across the planet’s face, but it is quite a different thing to stand in the heat of July, the smell of damp lace and pine sap and other people’s bodies all around you, and know those words to be true.
By the time they got to “What Ya Gonna Do When Ya Lamp Burn Down,” the crowd joined in—men, women, and children, singing and slapping hands and the bark of the trees—Experience and Louisa in the middle, still hand in hand, their voices rising above it all. I think it is the closest I have ever come in my life to seeing true love, and for a moment my sadness and anger were gone. I only felt the warmth of something fulfilled, and I closed my eyes to make it stop, because it felt too much.
The rest of the afternoon was the bazaar and the feast—long tables brought out and set with cake. Plates of oysters, too, which Experience and Louisa had never seen before.
“You tip them back, like this.” I showed them, and when I held one up to Louisa’s lips, she began to giggle. “That smell!” she cried. Experience pinched her elbow and then blushed hard, and they would not tell me anymore what it was about, so I drifted away from them, alone again.
Emmanuel Chase kept his distance from me, walking among the crowd, talking to the prettiest women and girls, laughing with the men. I thought, Had we really stood under those trees and talked of marriage? I could not believe, would not have believed it, to look at him.
“You are in-fat-u-a-ted.” It was Lucien who sang this. There was a slight weave in his step as he moved toward me, slapping the rhythm on his thigh. When he reached me, he smelled the same as Madeline Grady’s barrels of beer.
“You know this place is temperate,” I said.
“Not over there it’s not.” He pointed behind the trees, where a man was making his way gingerly out of the underbrush, passing another who was stepping in. “They have one barrel there, not too much, just enough to keep us all toasty.”
“You disrespect our mothers.”
“You keep acting so sour, Dr. Chase will never look your way,” he said, and then began to laugh.
“You should leave, Lucien, before your mother discovers you.”
“You never leave their skirts.”
“You do not seem too interested in that either.”
“You shouldn’t run after the first man who makes your blood roll like a river, Libertie.”
“I will see you this evening, when you’ve sobered up a bit,” I said.
I did not like to admit it, but Lucien had troubled me. I walked through the rest of the bazaar, stopping to look at the tables with things for sale. Some of the younger girls had knitted a set of fingerless gloves, and I spent time pulling them on and off my hands, becoming angrier and angrier at Lucien’s presumption. My feelings toward Emmanuel could not be so obvious as he wished to imply. I was not anything that a person like that could easily know—a man who looked to make his mother laugh first, a man who couldn’t hold his own after one mug of beer drunk under the trees.
I opened my purse and took the piece of paper out of it again. There was my own hand, writing out the events of this day. And on the back, the other script, the one I’d seen that morning.
To My Libertie
This is a note to declare my undying affection for you. I wish, above all, for you to become my wife. I think, if you are being honest with yourself, you would wish it, too.
Yours,
Emmanuel Chase
Not even a bit of poetry, I thought. I admired him for that. For speaking plainly. For avoiding some terrible simile about my eyes, as someone as low as Lucien would have done.
“You are back,” I heard, and then I turned and saw it was Miss Hannah, standing with Miss Annie, both of them looking at me with a friendly weariness.
“Yes,” was all I could say.
In the years since her brother left us for the water, Miss Hannah had grown smaller, so that now she stood at Miss Annie’s shoulder, Her back was still straight, but her eyes were nearly colorless. I had thought her old when I was a girl, but more or less the same age as my mother. Now, I saw she was much older.
“Studies suit you well,” Miss Hannah said, and I reached out to grab her hand.
“I have thought of you and Mr. Ben often,” I said.
It was the wrong thing. Miss Hannah’s face broke, and she lowered her eyes, and Miss Annie looked at me, exasperated. But Miss Hannah held my hand in hers so tight that my fingers tingled, and she would not let go.
“Have you seen?” she said. “He’s here, with us.”
She would not let go. I put my other hand on top of hers, and she clasped her other hand over that, so that we were bound together. She led me away from the table before I could snatch up again my slip of paper from where I’d stuffed it, underneath the pile of empty gloves.
“Here,” she said.
It was a wooden marker. It was painted with the name benjamin smith—the name Miss Hannah had chosen for him and herself. Someone had painted wings on either side, but they were so clumsy they looked like crescent moons.
The church, at least, had given him a prized space, in the middle of the yard between two larger stones. Miss Hannah gazed at the plot as if her brother’s body was really underneath it, as if he could rise up through the grass to be with us.
“I am saving up for stone,” she said. “I had this put up last year.”
She still held my hands in hers. “You are a good sister,” was all I could manage to say, but she did not seem to wish for more. She only wanted me to stand in her fifteen years of grief, beside the play grave of her brother.
It was colder and almost dusk by the time Miss Hannah let my hand go and I could leave the graveyard. By then, the celebration had quieted. Some men and women lingered, eating the last of strawberries that had been set out. A few children, waiting for their parents, slept in a pile underneath one of the tables.
There was no sign of Emmanuel Chase. When I went back to the table to try and find his letter, it was gone. I told myself, even though I knew it wasn’t true, that maybe someone had swept it away with the dirty rushes or packed it with their extra pairs of
gloves. I tried to find Louisa or Experience to help, but I was told they had already headed back to my mother’s house. So I started the walk from the church alone, my hands still pressed from Miss Hannah’s grip.
The lightning bugs were out already. They darted all around me, sometimes deep into the fields, sometimes just a few steps ahead. The light was almost purple, and it made me wish that Emmanuel was beside me—if only to be able to remark on how strange and beautiful it was, if only to have a testimony. I slowed, as if I was walking arm in arm with a companion. It did not seem fair that this whole night was stretched before me and I was its lone witness.
I was thinking about this, about the ghost of Emmanuel beside me, when I came to my mother’s house and I saw her, standing in the open doorway, the light from inside blazing behind her.
“Hello,” I said, startled.
And she said, “You’re lying to me, Libertie.”
“It’s not enough,” she said, “that my only daughter has not spoken a word to me since she has come home. That she has hidden behind friends and acquaintances. That she has not even given me a report of her year—”
“I wasn’t—”
“It is not enough that she has not come to visit our clinic, has ignored my letters for months. But above all of that, I find she has kept her worst secret from her own mother.”
How could she know? I thought. Who could have told her that I had failed, that I was cast out of Cunningham College? Briefly, I flashed in anger upon Experience and Louisa. But I had not shared my disgrace even with them. Who could have told my mother?
“You’ve lied to me. How long have you been lying to me?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Mama.”
“Stop! It makes me sick to hear it.”
She had not moved from the door. She would not let me pass, I realized with terror. I stood out in that night air that had seemed so beautiful, so magical, just a minute ago. If only she would let me into the house.
I started up the stairs, but she moved from the door to meet me at the top step.
“How long? That’s all I ask. I put the blame on you. How long?”
“Please, Mama, let me inside.”
“I cannot trust you in this house anymore. How can I trust you even to sleep under this roof?”
I began to cry. “I am sorry, Mama. Please forgive me.”
“I can’t even trust those,” she said, her voice thick. I realized, with a start, she was crying herself. “Your tears are lies, too.”
“Please, Mama, just let me inside, and I will explain. I will explain everything.”
“You cannot sleep here,” she said.
“Please!”
“I cannot trust you underneath this roof.”
I do not know how I managed to be on the ground, but I was. I had sunk all the way down into the earth, and could only double over and cry. I knelt like that until I heard the swing of her skirts as she came down off the porch, as she stood over me. I could smell her perfume, the smell of the lemon juice she used to bathe her lily petals and keep her skin soft and bright, the hot cotton of her waistcoat—my mother’s good graces in the air around me.
And then she thrust something small and crumpled up underneath my nose.
In that queer purple light of the evening, I could just make out my wife … you would wish it, too … Emmanuel Chase.
“What is this?” I said.
“I am not a fool, Libertie. So do not treat me as one.”
I took the paper from her hand and turned it over in my own.
“This is what’s upset you?”
“You’ve compromised your honor with a man who lives in my house. Of course this has upset me! Have you lost your mind?”
She did not know. She did not know that I had failed. I heard myself give a short, hoarse laugh. And then she slapped me.
My mother had never hit me before. Even as a small child, she had not swatted me—only Lenore, on rare occasions, had done something like that. I cannot say it even hurt very much—her blow landed soft, like a brush of silk, as if she had changed her mind between raising her arm and swinging it down.
When it was done, we both could only look at each other in surprise.
She recovered first. “I cannot believe you could be so foolish.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“You have ruined your future. You have spoiled our plans.”
I laughed again at that, in the same hoarse voice, which sounded foreign, even to me. “They’re already spoiled.”
She raised her hand again. “Don’t! Don’t tell me if you’ve sunk that low! Don’t say it!”
I should have said, I am a failure, but not in the way you think. I should have said, I cannot pass a simple anatomy class, and even if I raise all the money in the world from Tom Thumb weddings and girls singing, Cunningham College will probably not want me back.
Instead, I said, to the dirt beneath me, “I will never be a doctor.”
She sank down beside me. She was there on the road beside me, in front of our house, and her face now was merely her own, the moonlight masking the changes that had shocked me when I first saw her that day. My mother.
“You’ve given up your dream.”
“It wasn’t mine,” I said. “You dreamt it for me.”
“It was ours.”
“I cannot join you,” I said. “I am sick of the smell of other women’s blood, Mama. Please.”
“So you’ll leave me,” she said. “So you chose your body over your mind. So you were weak.”
“I am weak. But I did not fail you like that. Dr. Chase has been nothing but a gentleman. I have conducted myself with honor with him—”
“I have no reason to believe you,” she said. “You’ve already proven yourself a liar.”
She sat back in the dirt. Then she lay all the way down in the dust until she was looking at the night sky. We sat like that: Mama seeing stars, and me not daring to raise my eyes from the dirt, until she sighed heavily and settled even deeper into her skirts.
“I gave you too much freedom,” she said. “So much freedom and you gave it up for the first bright man who smiled at you.”
“I don’t want him, Mama.”
She took my hand in hers, still staring into the sky. Her voice was smaller now. “I know these tricks, Libertie. I hear them every day from the girls and women who come into my clinic, all big with child from a man who’s left them. They tell me, even then, ‘I don’t want him,’ but it’s only to save their dignity. You think he will do this to you, too? I should know that, at least.”
“He hasn’t done a single thing to me,” I said. “And I assure you, I don’t want him to.”
“You think it’s love,” she said. “Maybe it is love. But it is quite a thing, to be a wife. It is not the same as a lover. It is not the same as a doctor—”
“I know that, at least, Mama.”
“It is definitely not the same as being a free woman.” She turned to me, her eyes shining. “This is your ambition? You could be so much more, Libertie.”
“No,” I said, my voice thick with tears. “I can’t.”
She gave a ragged cry, the most terrible sound I have ever heard in the world, and if you would have told me as a little girl that I would have been the one to cause my mother to make that sound, I would have called you a liar. But here I was, beside her, as she sobbed.
“Come, Mama.” I pushed myself up, to stand above her. She looked so small in her circle of skirts, her head bent. I leaned down and pulled her up by her elbows. “Come, Mama. I am not lost to you yet. I will not marry him, if it makes you cry,” I said. I would have said anything to get her to stop making that sound. I got her to her feet. I put my arm through hers. I walked with her slowly, through the yard, up the steps, through the still-open door.
It took a moment to realize we were not alone in the room. There was Lenore, and our houseguests—the Graces, Madame Elizabeth, Lucien, and Emmanuel Chase himself, who
stood at the mantel, a look of nervous expectation on his face.
He stepped forward. “You told her?” he said. I realized he was speaking to me.
“She discovered on her own,” I said.
Mama stepped forward and held out her hand. “Congratulations,” she said.
As Emmanuel reached to take it, she doubled over, a stream of sick splattering the hem of her skirts.
And that was how we announced we were to be married.
Emmanuel said we could always elope. “We do not need to stand up before your mother and family. We could be married by a judge and leave for Haiti as soon as possible.” But I knew if the mere mention of marriage had made my mother sick, it would possibly kill her if we brought more humiliation through an elopement.
So we planned for our wedding. Quickly, because in my harried scheming, I’d figured it would be another two months before Cunningham College’s letter informing my mother that I was not welcome back would reach the house. If I was safely married by then, and on a ship to Haiti, I could spare myself the exquisite pain of seeing her further disappointment. I was a coward in that way.
It seemed to me marriage was as good a plan as any other. I would not be a doctor, but I could perhaps be a wife. This optimism sprang from the fact that I was still not sure what a wife would be, but I knew what a doctor was and that I couldn’t be one.
We were to be wed quickly. Madame Elizabeth announced she would make my wedding dress and wrote to Monsieur Pierre to tell him she would not be home for another month. She installed herself in Mama’s front parlor, with a ream of white cotton and one long panel of lace that we had managed to buy, which she assured me she would drape across my shoulders.
All of the preparations I had made for the play wedding just a few weeks before suddenly became real. We were to be married in the same circle of trees, as close to my father’s grave as possible. I had insisted on that for Mama’s sake, but my mother had looked at me blankly when I’d told her, then nodded. She was not speaking to me. She nodded or shook her head, but she did not share any words with me. She continued to speak to Emmanuel—with him, she kept everything the same—issuing him orders for the clinic, conferring with him on patients, showing him the books. It was only I who was enveloped in silence.
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