It only looked like flashes of light, and I told him so.
“No,” he said. “They’re dolphins.”
“Or maybe they are sirens,” I said “come to lure all these men to their deaths.”
“La Sirèn has a song,” he said solemnly. “They say her home is at the back of the mirror. In the other world.”
He did not move his mouth from my ear. Instead, he chanted into it,
La Sirèn, la balèn,
Chapo m’ tonbe nan lanmè.
M’ t’ap fè yon ti karès ak La Sirèn,
Chapo m’ tonbe nan lanmè.
M’ kouche ak La Sirèn,
Chapo m’ tonbe nan lanmè.
“What does it mean?”
“You have to guess.”
“I do not know your language well enough yet.”
“And you’ll never learn it with that attitude.”
“Tell me what it means.”
He leaned in close again. He had been waiting for this. I had played the game he wished, without even knowing it. “You’ll learn tonight.”
That night, he told me to lie on my back this time. As he pushed my nightgown down past my shoulders, I covered my face with my hands. He said:
“The mermaid, the whale,
“My hat falls into the sea.
“I caress the mermaid,
“My hat falls into the sea.
“I lie down with the mermaid,
“My hat falls into the sea.”
I saw Ben Daisy’s hat, covered in pansies, held to my mother’s chest. I pressed my fingertips into my eyelids until the image was washed over in an explosion of stars.
“Take your hands from your face, Libertie.”
I did what Emmanuel asked. We stared at each other for a minute, listening to the water move beneath us.
“Take off your shirt,” I said to him finally. He did not break my gaze as he obeyed me.
His skin looked so smooth in the dark. I reached for it, to run my hands along it, and he drew his breath in, sharp, as if I had burnt him. And then he caught my hand in his and firmly placed it back at my side.
“What we do together, the word for it in Kreyòl is ‘kouche.’ It means to make love, but it also means to be born and to die, and to lie down, too.”
“All those things at once?”
“All those things happen when we lie together. You must have felt that.”
I looked at him. I twitched my hips, impatient. “So begin, then.”
“Dogs’ bloodberries.” He reached for my breasts and began to softly touch them.
“What are those?” My voice was faint.
“They are little red berries—peppers, really—that grow at home. Women take them for their wombs—with the plant you have, vervain. It waters them. They become fertile.”
“You are very poetic,” I said. “For a doctor.”
I disobeyed him. I touched the skin on his chest as he knelt above me, until he doubled over himself and shuddered, the wet of him falling across my thighs.
It was strange, to stand with him in the mornings, in daylight, in the middle of the ocean, and act as though what had happened between us at night had not happened. I could see, in the glances of the crew members, in the eyes of the white men on board, that they had guessed what we did at night, had imagined something even more. But here was Emmanuel, walking me carefully up and down the deck, as if he hadn’t wiped his seed on my skin at dawn.
We were four days from landfall when it happened. He had drawn every one of the plants in his knowledge, some of them twice, and the sheets in our cabin were stiff and scratchy with his work.
“There is only one more,” he said, “that I have not told you.”
“What is it?” I said.
By now, when he shuddered, I held him. Sometimes, he pressed his face into my neck. When he touched himself, I allowed myself to look everywhere—his face, his chest, his arm moving ridiculously quickly. Even his member I knew now, like some other specimen to understand. It was still strange, but it had become expected.
“Persimmon,” he said. “They are yellow, and you wait until they are so ripe they are swollen, almost bursting, and when you finally taste them, they taste like the gods.”
And then he did what he had not done before. He pushed my legs apart and bent his head there, and moved his tongue until I was moving my legs apart farther for him, without shame, only urgency. Then he was in me and above me, moving with the same rapidity as he did his own hand, so that it was over quickly enough—the groan again, and then the collapse, though this time I could feel him as he grew softer, soft enough to slip from between my legs.
I had thought, from Mama, that all love was fair. That’s the way Mama practiced it. Love was doling out the right amount of care to each patient and spending the right amount of time at each bedside. No more, no less. Mama’s love was democratic. But Emmanuel was a despot in his love. He grasped at me—at my legs and my arms and my belly and back—as if, if he held on tight enough, he could claim it all.
Our final nights before we reached Haiti, I told him to be quiet. I looked at his body and saw a psalm. Mama had told me a daughter is like a poem, and so a mate’s body, as made for me as mine was made for him, was like a psalm from God, I thought.
I am black but comely, I sang to him to make him laugh. He did, though he blushed, and it was another point of wonder, that about this my husband could be pious.
“You sing to me the poetry of nature, and I sing to you the poetry of God,” I said to him. Again, he looked shocked, and that was a pleasure, too, maybe the deepest one, after all these nights.
Behold, thou art fair, my love;
behold, thou art fair;
thou hast doves’ eyes.
Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green …
A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me;
he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts …
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood,
so is my beloved among the sons.
I sat down under his shadow with great delight,
and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
This is what I sang to him, the word of God all jumbled up, as I held the back of him in my hands, as I tasted his skin and flesh and muscle and bone.
My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my very self, my inside, opened up to him. I rose up to open to my beloved, is what I sang when I saw Emmanuel’s brow at my thigh, his head between my legs, his eyes closed, the only movement the ship and him.
He told me about all the plants discovered by man, and I sang back to him the fruits from God. I panted in his ear, “We are one, we are together, as you promised,” and I did not think of who I belonged to (my mother) before I belonged to him.
I spoke to him God’s poetry while he lay in me, the holy words which seemed to have spoken of us before all creation, all nature, all wrath.
Before I had left, Mama had given me a satchel with five bags of powders she had ground herself. “You do not have to be a slave to him in that way, at least,” she’d said. I had seen enough of her books, copied her columns of writings, to know that she gave this remedy to most of the women who passed through her clinic. The richer ones, she asked for payment; the poorer ones, she did not. And sometimes, a woman had had the course but came to Mama anyways, a few months later, her monthlies stopped and her middle thickening, and then Mama would shut the office door and I would hear the woman sob that Mama was fallible in this.
That would never be me, I thought giddily. My freedom with Emmanuel would come from children. We would build a nation out of each other. That was what we were traveling toward. And our new country needed citizens—babies, so many babies, so many beautiful brown babies, all fat and ready to fill a house.
So I took the medicine she gave me and, one day before we spotted land at Jacmel, I scattered it all over the rail. I told Emmanuel what I was doing, too, and he was delig
hted.
We were sure that where we were headed, we wouldn’t need it. We were free to be abundant.
Emmanuel had told me, “Jacmel is the most beautiful city in the world.”
It is a difficult thing, to be told something is beautiful by someone who already loves it best. As we approached, he watched my face avidly for my approval, and I tried to look expectant, to look amazed by what I saw. But it looked, at first, like any other town. I smiled and gasped, for his sake, and I did not think it bad, this first falsehood that stood between me, Emmanuel, and this land. I thought it was another sign of love.
The town hugged the base of the mountains—you could see them rolling up, as the ship approached. They were a deep, inviting green, and the buildings that came up to the shore were variations of white and pink and yellow.
We had come only with two trunks—one packed with our clothes, intermingled, the other full of Emmanuel’s supplies: his doctor’s bag, the plant specimens he had managed to collect in New York, and the homeopathic literature he was eager to bring back to Haiti. The rest of what we would need for our life together, he said, would be in his father’s house. Since we did not have many possessions, we hired a man and a mule to take us to Emmanuel’s home, which we reached by steadily climbing the road from the wharves, up through town. We passed the Rue de Commerce, where the traders and businessmen had their shops and then, farther, up the steep city streets, until we got to the quarter where Emmanuel lived, where the wealthiest lived and looked down at the harbor below. All around me, people spoke and called and laughed in a language I did not understand, and it struck me, finally, what I had done. The sun was high above us, my skin was warm and sweating, I was in a heat I did not recognize, climbing a hill a thousand miles away from my mother’s face, and I had not heard her voice for longer than a moment in nearly a year. I could not help it: I began to cry.
“What is the matter?” he asked.
All I could say to him was, “I am a foolish girl.”
The road got steeper. The dust rose to my eyes, making them even wetter. By the time we reached the house, Emmanuel had begun to walk many feet ahead of me, overwhelmed by the tears on my face.
When Emmanuel had whispered to me in my mother’s waiting room about his father’s house, I admit I had not paid much attention to his actual words. It was from his tone, the urgency of how he described it, that I had imagined it as something much grander than what was before me. He had spoken lovingly of the large shuttered windows that faced the street. Of the front veranda his father had built, with the iron railings. Of the oak front door that was always kept shut and, cut into it, the smaller door that the family used to pass in and out of the house. “We only open the doors proper,” Emmanuel had told me, “when someone in our family dies.”
The actual house that was before me was shorter than what I had pictured, but still impressive. The wood was painted a pale pink, and the black iron railings were winking in the sun. Emmanuel’s father had been given the land when he came to Haiti ten years before—the promise to American Negro settlers fulfilled. He had traveled up and down the island, writing to the mother church back home, until they gave him the money to build a house worthy of the bishop that he was. At the very top of the house’s flat roof was a weather vane with the imprint of an iron rooster. It was strange to have on a house in a place that felt as if wind had not been born yet, I thought, as I looked above and felt the sweat trickle down my neck.
At the front door, the mule driver untied our two trunks from the back of the animal and said something to Emmanuel. A joke—because Emmanuel threw back his head and laughed, and tipped him an extra coin.
“What was it?” I asked, wiping the sleeve of my dress across my face, trying to rub it clean of dirt and tears.
“He only noticed you crying,” Emmanuel said. “And teased me about it.”
“What did he say?”
“You have to learn the language sometime, Libertie,” he said.
I thought at first he had arranged for the household to greet us; inside the hall, three people stood in a straight line. His father broke form first—a man a few inches shorter than Emmanuel, so just about level with my height. He was the same complexion as Emmanuel. He reached out to shake his son’s hand. But he did not extend one to me, only blinked.
Beside him was Ti Me. She, too, was not quite how Emmanuel had described her. In Kings County, he had told me that Ti Me had been young once but had dedicated her youth to raising him, after his mother and siblings had died. I had pictured a woman old and bent, with gray hair. But the woman who stepped forward to greet me was probably at most thirty. Her skin was smooth. And she had bright, intelligent eyes, which darted over Emmanuel’s face, then my own. She embraced him, as his father had, and pulled at his cheeks—scolding him, I guessed, for not eating enough. She was the only person in the house as dark as me.
Beside her was a woman Emmanuel’s height. Ti Me was dressed in white, in this heat. But this woman was dressed in a rusty-red skirt and a black jacket. Her skin was as pale as Emmanuel’s and his father’s, but it had a bright-pink undertone, as if she was about to burn. Her hair hung in great stiff sections around her cheeks. Each section had been ironed once and then again, to get rid of the kink, and then violently curled. Her face was Emmanuel’s, but leaner. His twin, Ella, I realized, with a start.
“And who is this?” she said as I stood beside Emmanuel.
“My wife,” he said.
“You’re married?” She raised one pale hand to her mouth.
I turned to Emmanuel. “You did not tell them?”
His father looked as if he was going to shout, and his sister was holding her stiff hair back from her face, her lips beginning to part—in a smile or a scream, I could not tell.
“You did not get my letters?” Emmanuel stepped back.
“You’ve married without my permission?” his father said. “And to whom?” He looked at me again, the whole length of me. I was, I could tell, in some way, lacking.
“Libertie Sampson. She is Dr. Sampson’s very own daughter. A physician in her own right. A graduate of Cunningham College.”
I pulled on Emmanuel’s arm to stop him, but he would not. “A true scholar,” he said.
“You married without my blessing,” his father said.
“I wrote to you to tell you. I sent three letters to you to tell you of it.”
“Who married you?” This was from his sister.
“The reverend of my church in Kings County,” I said. “Reverend Harland, whom I believe you know, Bishop Chase.”
Emmanuel’s father looked from me to his son. “You are always too rash,” he said.
I could feel myself begin to cry again. But I could see, from the corner of my eye, Emmanuel’s sister watching me. So I stepped forward and unknotted the bonnet from under my chin. Once I had gotten it off, I moved toward Ella and took her in my arms. I held her there, though I could feel her body stiffen. I felt her tortured curls scratch against my cheeks, made harsh by whatever hot comb she’d lain on them. She smelled of dried perspiration and burnt hair.
“I am sorry,” I said. “But I hope we can be sisters now.”
I let her go and hurried over to her father, avoiding whatever look was on her face. “I am sorry, sir,” I said, holding him in the same way. “I hope you can forgive your daughter.”
I held him longer than I had Ella. He, too, was resistant, but I sensed that I should not let him go as soon, or this whole scene would be made even more ridiculous. As I held him, I could hear Emmanuel speaking in Kreyòl to Ti Me, who then shrieked—he must have told her I was his wife—and gave a short laugh.
“It is not funny,” I heard Ella scold.
“Sorry, mum,” Ti Me said.
I held on for a few moments more, for good measure, and then I let the bishop go. I stepped back to stand beside Emmanuel and watched his face, warily.
“It is not how I wished it would happen,” Bishop Chase said f
inally.
“But we are here with you now, Father.”
“Ti Me,” the bishop said, “show them to Emmanuel’s room,” and then he left the foyer.
Ella had composed herself by then.
“Will you show Libertie the house?” Emmanuel asked her.
“We will have four for dinner, not three,” she called to Ti Me.
Ella kissed her brother on the cheek. “We are happy you are here,” she said. And then she left us.
Emmanuel and I still stood in the foyer of the house, which was so dim all I could see of that murky room with high ceilings was a flash of silver from a mirror hung on the farthest wall. All the shutters were closed against the afternoon sun.
To the right of the foyer, I could see a small room—with a table and chair, and a few books stacked on the end of the table—what must have been Bishop Chase’s library. It, too, was dimly lit—its large window opening out onto the street also shuttered. There was a flutter in that room, and I realized that was where Emmanuel’s father must have retreated.
To my left was a staircase, leading to the bedrooms. Directly in front of us was a dining room, its heavy oak table set for a formal dinner with six places, a single silver candelabra in the middle. The windows were unshuttered in the dining room, so that you could look out onto the back courtyard. It was full of a few flowering bushes and some clay pots growing herbs. The ground had been overlaid with stone. At the back of the courtyard was a small shed—the cookhouse, I realized—and farther away from everything, the latrine. Through the window, I saw Ella reappear, stalking toward the cookhouse.
“Come,” Emmanuel said, taking my hand. He led me up the stairs, Ti Me behind us, carrying one of the trunks on her back.
“Oh,” I said when I saw her struggle, and Emmanuel looked over his shoulder, then to me.
“She will carry it,” he said carefully.
Upstairs were five rooms—more than I had expected. But then I remembered the mother and brothers and babies long dead. This house had been built for a much-larger family.
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