Madame Elizabeth tried to talk with her. Emmanuel himself asked her to please stop. But she would only say, “I’ll speak to my daughter again on her wedding day.”
The Graces had left by then. They were committed to two more dates in the North—one in Hartford, Connecticut, and one in Florence, Massachusetts. We’d watched them leave for Manhattan, and as the boat pulled away to cross the East River, I tried to remember that I had never fully belonged to them at all. I had always been left out. Emmanuel took my hand as he stood beside me. I told myself, Soon, you will belong to him, and the thought was both thrilling and made me sad. If you would have asked me then what my heart’s desire was, it would have been to be with the Graces on a ferry or in a coach, maybe thinking pleasantly about Emmanuel Chase but not anywhere close to him in reality.
When we could no longer see the ship, we walked back downtown to Mama’s hospital, to where Emmanuel now slept, in the red velvet waiting room of the clinic. He had agreed to leave my mother’s house the night our engagement was announced. “Believe me,” he had said to her as he held his bags before him, “I meant no disrespect to your household, Madame Doctor. You have been nothing but—”
And Mama had cut him off. “I believe you,” she’d said, and he had been so relieved he did not hear what I had heard, the words unsaid, which were that she believed him—but not me, her own daughter.
Emmanuel and I allowed ourselves a half hour visit each day in the waiting room, when it had closed for the afternoon, while Mama and Lenore, on the floors above us, set the clinic right for the night. We would sit in that parlor, and Emmanuel would tell me what would come to pass in Haiti.
“In Haiti, you will meet my sister and Ti Me.”
“In Haiti, Papa will be the first to greet you.”
“You’ll learn how to say that word, once we are in Haiti.”
And I could almost believe him, I desperately wished to believe him, that the future was a promise. But then I would leave him and go back home.
Madame Elizabeth did not, of course, have her dressmaker’s dummy in Kings County, and so instead she laid out the pieces of my dress on the parlor floor. Every night, there was a bit more to my bridal costume, and I would come back from my talk with Emmanuel and see it where it lay, deflated, on the floorboards, a kind of skinny ghost of my life to come. It made me sick to see it all flat like that. A bad omen.
“Put it on me,” I told Miss Elizabeth, and she laughed. “I’ve never seen a girl so eager to be a bride.”
The night before the wedding, Emmanuel Chase came for dinner, and it was almost as it had been when we had first met. Mama stood at the top of the table and raised her cup and toasted both of us. “A happy marriage to my Libertie,” she said, and I felt the tears run down my face in gratitude that she had seemed to forgive me.
But when I went to embrace her later that evening and held her close, she whispered in my ear, “Don’t do it,” and I realized that she would never bring herself to forgive me, and I went up to bed cold.
Emmanuel Chase stayed the night, since he did not wish to travel back to the clinic so late. I lay in my room, feeling the heat creep back up my bones, imagining that I heard him crawling up the stairs to scratch at my door and beg for … what, I was not sure. I knew what happened in the marriage bed. I had known since a young age—Mama had not been shy about that. I thought of what would happen the next night and kicked the sheets off—they suddenly felt too heavy.
In the last week, our time together in the parlor had become something else. It was no longer a telling of what would happen once we got to that country I still could not quite imagine. Our time had become a kind of war between ourselves—or rather, a war of both of us against desire. I did not think a man could make the sounds that Emmanuel Chase made, as he reached first to grab my shoulders, then my arms, then my forearms, then my hands, where they rested in my lap—too daring, that. Then back to my shoulders and then my neck, which he pulled close to his, forcing me to bend my head toward his, as he desperately moved his mouth. I would watch him do all this and realize, with amazement, that I was doing the same to him, holding with the same urgency to his neck, mirroring the movement of his lips with my own.
And then we would hear a step above us, or Lenore or Mama drop a scalpel, or the sound of a canister rolling across the floor, and we would separate—those last few days, I’d heard him gasp as we did so—and pull apart, and sit in the velvet again, to quiet our breathing.
So I lay awake and waited to hear his fingernails draw across my door. But all night long, there was nothing.
At dawn, I rose. I could not stand lying there anymore. I crept down to the parlor and knelt on the floor, running my thumb up and down the seams of the wedding gown. Madame Elizabeth had stitched them with such care I wasn’t even sure where they were. I discovered one stray tuft of a thread, and I almost pulled it loose.
That’s how Madame Elizabeth found me when she came down an hour later. “You waste time in fancies,” she said. “You only have so many hours in your wedding day.” And she had helped me stand, directed me to the bowl of water she’d set out for my bath.
When I put on the final dress, the armpits and the neck immediately darkened, sweat leaking into tight cotton.
I was standing in the parlor, my arms above my head, as Madame Elizabeth dabbed underneath them with bicarbonate of soda, oohing and aahing about her progress, when Lenore rushed in.
“It is Miss Hannah,” she said. “She’s breathing heavy and almost gone.”
So Mama and Emmanuel both left the house—Mama in her nicest shawl, and Emmanuel half-shaved. “I can come, too,” I said, but neither stopped to tell me no; they were both already on their way.
Madame Elizabeth looked at me, full of pity. “It’s probably best for you to stay here.”
The house was suddenly quiet again, without them. It was almost like the old days. I lifted the hem of my skirt and headed toward the garden. “You’ll spoil it!” Madame Elizabeth called.
I turned my head to look at her. “I won’t.”
Lenore had taken good care of the garden while I was away. I saw my mother’s hand on the little pieces of wood she’d stuck by each row, and below it, sometimes, in Lenore’s, a drawing of the leaves in question. I squatted, just enough, over the grass. I closed my eyes. I breathed in.
Mama still grew pansies. I picked the pinkest one, pulled it from its stem, and rolled the petals between my fingers till they tore apart. They left a stinging stickiness, made the palms of my hands dry and thirsty. I held my palm to my nose, smelling my skin and the petals. I lifted my open palm to my mouth and licked it clean, each finger carefully, the bitter taste of flowers on my tongue. I reached out, with both fists, for the heads of more flowers and crammed them into my mouth. Did not the Bible say, My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies? I rolled petals over my lips and between my teeth until my mouth was sour with them. I’d read so many poems comparing beauty and love to flowers, but no one talked of how much they actually stung your tongue.
My haunches ached, from squatting. Finally, I stood up, placed my hand on the small of my back, and stretched backward to keep the hem of my gown out of the dirt. Then I left the garden and went back up the stairs, to wait for my groom and my mother.
Our wedding, I do not remember well. I only remember the sadness and shock from the loss of Miss Hannah. Madame Elizabeth and I cut the hem of one of Mama’s old cloaks and tore it up into black armbands. Mama wore hers on her right arm, and I wore mine on my left, as she walked me down the aisle.
“A wife truly is a helpmate and a pillar,” Reverend Harland said as Emmanuel and I knelt before him. “She is obedient to her Lord, her husband. We cannot raise up a great nation of man without a loyal and obedient wife and mother—as she stands, as she decides, so stands and decides the fate of the Negro people. The redemption and the triumph of the Negro race will come from the hearth, will come from the home, and will spread from th
ere to the ballot box, to the pulpit, to the world. A wife holds the world in her lap and hands it to her husband.”
While he spoke, Emmanuel and I looked straight ahead. I could see, from the corner of my eye, Emmanuel bend his head at the word “lord” and not raise it again till Reverend Harland pronounced us married. Then I turned to him. He kissed my cheek, and there was a smattering of subdued applause. He helped me to my feet, and we walked down the aisle, arm in arm, the whole church watching us.
The heat did not break. We stood out in the sun while the men shook Emmanuel’s hand and the women looked from him to me and back again and then at the waist of my dress, trying to determine if it was thicker than it had been a month before, trying to find a reason we had married so hastily or even, I saw in the petty flash of a few eyes, why he had married me at all.
Our wedding night, we slept the same we had the day before—myself in my own bedroom, my husband down below. There was a moment when Lucien had leered and Madame Elizabeth had nudged Mama—“Perhaps we should leave the house to the newlyweds”—but Mama had looked so stern the joke had died, and so no one had tried to test her.
I lay as I had only a few hours ago, restless in bed, even the thinnest of sheets oppressive. Except now, there was the scratch at the door I had waited for. I opened it, and Emmanuel stood before me. In the dark of the hallway, his skin gleamed, so pale.
“We will wait,” he said. “It is enough to wait.” And then he leaned over and kissed me, this time full on the mouth. “You taste of flowers,” he said.
“Flowers taste awful, you know.”
He smiled at me, until I returned his smile, and then he left my door.
We were to leave in three days for Haiti, accommodations Emmanuel had worked so hard to secure as soon as I’d accepted him.
Vrè lanmou pa konn danje
Real love knows no danger
Because our ship was headed to Haiti, there was no embarrassment about our berth. On Haitian ships—at least this one—colored people were allowed cabins. Already, this world was better. The ship’s captain knew Emmanuel’s father, and so we had a private cabin, given over to us with much winking and nodding, so much that I could not look anyone on board in the eye.
Mama did not come to see me off—she took her leave at her own front door. Lenore was the one who stood on the pier below us and waved the white handkerchief for us, the last little bit of home I would see for a long time, maybe until I died. That thought brought a sharp taste to my tongue, a tightness to my throat. Not tears, because I had promised myself I would not cry about saying goodbye to that world, Mama’s world; I had promised myself I would celebrate. I saw Lenore’s handkerchief flash once more, and I turned my head to spit into the ocean, to get rid of that acid within me.
I spent the rest of the afternoon in the cabin. I was seasick. I did not know this about myself, as I had never traveled for so long on a boat before. It made me hate water and curse waves as we were rolled around over and over again. My head had a dull ache. Sometimes, Emmanuel would bring me cups of musty water, flat beer, sour cider. I could not eat the biscuits and dried fish that everyone else did. Even the sight of the curled tails, studded in salt, made me turn and be sick. I was miserable.
The only relief came at night. That first one, Emmanuel lay beside me, stinking of petrified fish, and told me to lie down on my stomach. “Take off your nightgown,” he said.
I should have felt scared or shy. If I was a good woman, I would have felt trepidation at the first person besides Mama to see me whole. But all I felt was the roll of the waves, and relief that I could get the muslin off my sweaty skin.
I shut my eyes tight while he traced a botany lesson on my skin with a single finger
“Dorstenia,” he said. “It looks like a tiny tree, crowned with a shooting star. You do not have trees like this, in America. It is a cousin of the fig. Its flower isn’t soft and inviting …” Here, his finger traced all the way down to my hips, where they met my thighs, lingered there, then made its way back up. “Its flower is hard and standoffish. It is called a ‘shield flower.’ Its face looks like a wall of stone. But when you look more closely, you see the flower is made up of a hundred little blossoms, all closed off tight.” He had reached my shoulders again, spread out his hands, felt the strength of my back.
“Why do you tell me these things now?” I asked. “You do not speak like a lover.” I at least felt calm enough to tease.
“Because as my wife,” he said, “there will be a whole new knowledge to learn, to aid me, and we may as well begin now.”
His voice was light, so I opened my eyes and saw the shape of him roll above me, before I closed them again, still cowed by the waves.
“But what if I am too sick to remember?”
“I’m not speaking to you. The lessons are not for you. They’re for your body. She will remember.” And then I felt his hand again, in the middle of my back, drawing, I suppose, the flowers that made up the shield of a Dorstenia.
He touched me until his fingers trembled. I shut my eyes even tighter, pressed myself into the hay mattress of the berth. His fingers lifted, and then I felt him turn over, onto his own back. He breathed hard and heavy, as if he was at a gallop, and the sheet that covered us began to shake.
I opened my eyes, sat up on my elbows, and watched him.
A man touching himself is a peculiar thing. My mother had told me about women’s bodies but not men’s. I’d seen male members on barnyard cats before, and sometimes rude and red on a stray dog. I remembered, once, glimpsing one, folded over on itself in a nest of gray hair, between the legs of an old man whom Mama helped to dying. I’d been six or seven then, and Mama had had to ask me three times to hand her her bag, before she’d looked up and followed my gaze. She’d pursed her lips, pulled the man’s cloak over him, and said, “You shouldn’t make patients uncomfortable with staring, Libertie.”
At Cunningham, in anatomy class, they had asked me to leave the room during the lessons on glands. I’d leaned against the side of the building, staring out into the unfinished green, listening to the muffled voice of the professor calling out the body parts. When the class was done, the men had left and I returned to the room, alone, to the lesson written on the chalkboard, to name the parts to myself. Since no one was in the room with me, I’d practiced saying them in different voices—high-pitched, like a superior lady’s, or low and growly, like a cat’s.
I watched my husband’s hand move faster. In the dark of the cabin, his skin was so dim—like a gray stone glimpsed at the bottom of a well. His breath shuddered. The whole cabin, so close, became nearly unbearably hot. And then he groaned—like a body taking its last breath—and shuddered one more time and was quiet.
I looked at him. He was staring glassily at the beams of the ship. “I’m sorry, my love,” he said. When he reached to touch my cheek, his hand was damp.
I did not leave my bed the next day. I tried to stand in the cabin, but the roll of the ship nearly forced me to my knees, so I crawled back into the berth and shut my eyes.
Emmanuel left me to walk on the deck. Above the groan of the ship as it moved through the water, I heard his high shout or some of his laughter.
The ship was a trading one that sold only a few berths to travelers. In the morning, he pulled me out of our bed to walk the deck with him. He said, “You cannot lie down forever. It will make everything worse.” My legs did not feel like my own. I was scared, and I took just a few steps before going back down. I did not know if there were any other women on board, or if there were, if those women were colored. And in my sickness, I did not have the will to ask him.
That night, he did not even have to ask me to lie down. I did so gladly, eager to feel something besides the waves.
“Plumeria,” he said, “are beautiful flowers. Long and thin and white. They look almost like stars, or maybe the legs of jellyfish. They could be as at home beneath the water as on land. They smell strongest at night.” Here, he lea
ned over and smelled my lap.
“The smell is beautiful,” he said. “So beautiful that three hundred years ago an Italian count stole it from the isles and made it into a perfume. The flowers make it to lure in sphinx moths, to do their pollinating for them. The moths are driven mad by the scent, looking everywhere for nectar, but the flowers are a flirt. Like my Libertie sometimes is. They have no nectar, but they’ve convinced the moths to do their propagating for them.”
And here, his fingers stopped trailing on my spine and swept down, and his whole hand grabbed my behind.
He was already touching himself. I turned over, and he knew I would watch him, so he looked into my eyes, his face looking first furious, then frightened, and then so melancholy I worried he would weep. He finally closed his eyes. His shoulders shuddered, he groaned again, like the ship in the ocean, and then he was still.
I was determined to walk the whole ship the next morning. I did so on my husband’s arm—he took me to the front and the other end. He made a show of calling me his “dear wife.” He said, “We are to live in Haiti.” I realized that the white men on board were mostly Northerners. It probably had not occurred to them, until that moment, that Emmanuel was colored. A few of them looked at him as if he had played some sort of trick. They, perhaps, had taken me for some sort of concubine. The crew was mostly Negroes—some American, but most from Haiti. They said, “Trè bèl” when they saw me, and tipped their hat if they had one.
There was one other woman on board, a white one, the captain’s daughter. She looked to be my age, maybe a few years younger. She looked straight through me when we passed, made a show of looking straight ahead.
“How much longer is the trip?” I asked Emmanuel.
“We have been on this journey for five days,” he said. “We have eight or nine more.”
Before us, the sea stretched in all directions, the water a deep green. “Do you see there?” he said, leaning in to point, his cheek on mine. “Look over there. Dolphins jumping in the waves.”
Libertie Page 18