The doors for each room were shut. Our room was the first by the staircase. Its windows, at least, faced the backyard, so the shutters were open and the light was not as dim. There was a single double bed, the mattress dipped in the middle, a mirror, this one smaller than the one downstairs in the foyer, a chest of drawers, with a metal owl and a pitcher standing on it, and a wooden cross, above the bed.
Ti Me letting the trunk fall to the floor with a bang. She looked at me, pointedly, and said, “Ti fi sa a twò cho.” Then she left us.
“What did she say?”
“You have to learn, Libertie.”
“You won’t even tell me this once?”
“She said you are a pretty mistress,” he said.
I sat on the mattress and felt it dip further beneath me. “You and Ella do look a lot alike,” I said.
“She was born three minutes ahead of me, my father tells me, but I’ve been playing catch-up ever since.”
He sat down beside me and put his arms around me. I would have been happy to begin, but as we moved together, I leaned my head back and saw that the walls of the room did not reach the ceiling. The top of the room was open, and if I listened, I could hear Bishop Chase and his daughter and Ti Me talking downstairs, almost as if they were in the room beside us.
“Stop,” I said. I pointed.
Emmanuel looked up. “Ah, all the rooms are like that in this house,” he said. “If the gap was closed, no air could circulate. It keeps the room cool. So that we may do things like this.” And then he pressed himself closer.
To live in a house where we all heard one another—I had not expected this. I thought, again, of my mother, and I wanted to cry. But I did not.
Instead, I pushed him away.
“They are waiting,” I said.
The Chase household seemed to exist in some other country. It was situated not quite in Haiti, not quite in America. Outside the house, the business of the world pulled Emmanuel and his father to different parts of town. Bishop Chase rose early in the morning and refused to take a midday break, even when the rest of Jacmel fell quiet at the hottest part of the day. During that time, he would come back to the house to sit in his office and go over his papers—letters to his diocese back in the United States, to other bishops on other islands, to the deacons and priests in churches he had yet to even see. His progress in building his own church had been quick at first but had slowed in the last few years. The wave of American Negroes he had expected to come and bolster his original outpost, after the war was over, had not arrived. I suspected that they were of the same mind as Lucien, not willing to give up their bets on life in America just yet. But it was the bishop’s belief that they would still come, in time.
I was to learn that Bishop Chase’s favorite subject was how foolish American Negroes were. It was clear he considered himself as not quite one, which was strange, because he most definitely did not consider himself Haitian. He was a citizen of the imaginary country where his household was based, one of hardworking and disciplined colored people—though he was convinced that these were very rare. Haitians were lazy and kept too many scores. American Negroes were too shortsighted and did not understand history.
“If he hates both, who does he expect to join him in the new world?” I’d asked Emmanuel once, and he had looked at me, wounded.
“No one loves the colored race as much as my father,” he’d said.
Well, he has a funny way of showing it, I wished to say. But I did not. I still thought it was love to say nothing.
At dinner that first night, I sat beside Emmanuel, my plate with two fewer potatoes than everyone else’s. Bishop Chase leaned over his own plate, heavy with potatoes and topped with the leg of a chicken, and explained himself to his son.
“I have backed the wrong horse,” he said.
Since they had arrived in the country, Bishop Chase and his fellow émigrés had rallied around the politician Geffrard, who had managed to become president for a time. Geffrard had given over lands at his own palace to the American émigrés when they’d first arrived, and when their initial crops had failed after the first growing season, he had given them food from his own provisions. He had also taken land from Haitians to give to the Americans. And the Americans were there because the poorer Haitians had refused to return to the sugar plantations that made Haiti such a jewel and a prize. Geffrard had looked for the Americans to take the land and force the smaller Haitian farmers into the type of destitution that would lead them to agree to the awful work of making sugar for no pay. But Bishop Chase did not mention this part of the deal they had entered into with Geffrard and his government. He only spoke of past and future glories.
Bishop Chase sighed. “No truer friend to the American Negro than Geffrard.”
“He has not been in power for nearly ten years,” Emmanuel said.
“Do not insult Father.” This was Ella.
“How is the truth an insult?”
“It is disrespectful,” she said.
“A listing of history is disrespectful?”
“You would know. You understand disobedience better than I do,” she said.
And then she turned to me. “Do you enjoy the food?”
I had never been looked at with such open hostility, but her mouth was fixed into a very sweet smile.
“I like it very much,” I said.
“You do not have to lie for politeness’ sake. Haitian food is not like what we have in America.”
“This meal is very good.”
“In America, you know, our meals are so much better for digestion,” she said. “Here, it is always the plantain, the potato, and sometimes the goat. What I would not give for a gooseberry.”
“Ah, but they are so sour,” I said. “You were lucky to have a good one. There have not been good crops the last few seasons. When were you last in America?”
I had thought this would flatter her, but she narrowed her eyes and turned back to her plate, and the table was quiet for a moment.
“Ella has not lived in America since she was nine years old,” Emmanuel said, laughing. I had pleased him with my unintended insult, I realized with dismay.
“If this is supposed to be proof of filial piety,” Ella said, “it is not a very good one.”
“Again, you are angered by facts.”
“Ella has missed your arguments,” Bishop Chase said, “though she won’t ever admit it.”
Perhaps, I thought, this was how siblings behaved. It was strange to see Emmanuel reduced to participating in someone else’s game.
“You worry about Boisrond-Canal?” Emmanuel asked his father.
“He is a good man, I think. And he is friendly to the Americans. But he does not understand what we could build here, for the black man. For all black men. He is thinking of his nation, to be sure, but he does not understand cultivating allies with American Negroes. And then the Negroes I introduce to him, their heads are turned by white Americans, by the crumbs they are finding here and there …”
“Not crumbs,” I said quietly, to my lap. Bishop Chase, at the pulpit in his mind now, did not hear me.
“They do not understand the future,” he said. ”And Boisrond-Canal … he does not understand our mission like Geffrard did.”
“Father, Geffrard is not even in the country anymore.”
“Good times will come again,” the bishop said. “It is just hard to know when.”
I ate in silence until I remembered. At least I may have discovered something to charm them, I thought.
“Emmanuel,” I said, “have you shown your father your gift?”
“Not yet.”
“I will go and get it now. I think he would enjoy it.”
I stood up from the table before he could stop me, went to the foyer where Ti Me had left the second trunk by the stairs. In the dim light, I fumbled with the latches. The gift had been packed under Emmanuel’s instruments and the dried cuttings wrapped in paper.
“Be careful, Liber
tie,” he called.
But I would not be deterred. I called back, “I know how to unpack a trunk.”
I gingerly laid each piece, each glass vial and book, on the ground until I found it, folded at the bottom of the trunk. I pulled it out, set it beside me, and repacked the pieces. When I came back to the dining room, the three of them were eating in silence. Ella did not even look up but kept her head bowed over her plate.
It was strange to have a bit of power over the two of them. To know something they did not. It had been so long since I felt this feeling that I relished it for a minute, holding the package behind my back.
“Well,” Emmanuel said, smiling, “show it to him.”
I shook the paper until it unfolded. It was a full print of all our colored heroes—there was Hiram Revels and Fredrick Douglass and John Mercer Langston, and even Martin Delany, my mother’s old friend.
“The Mystery, out of Pittsburgh, made prints for Independence Day,” I said. “Emmanuel bought it special for you, so that you could add it to your collection.”
“Ah.” Bishop Chase sighed. He looked at it from over his glasses but did not move to take it from my hands. “Yes. A thoughtful gift.” Then he turned his attention back to his plate.
I was left to stand there, all that power in my hands on that print, while Ella smiled in satisfaction at her plate and Emmanuel looked at his father, exasperated. He seemed about to open his mouth, to complain again, but I did not think I could bear it.
“I’ll leave it in the hall,” I said, “to hang.”
Back in the darkness of the foyer, I carefully folded the print and leaned it against the banister. I heard a rustling behind me and turned to see Ti Me. At her hip was a wicker basket, loaded down with linens. She stared steadily at me, holding my gaze. I smiled back at her. She did not move, did not blink, only looked into my eyes with a kind of curiosity.
I did not know what to do. But the way she stared at me, I began to think I understood. I bowed my head to her and made a short curtsy. When I raised my head, she looked at me a moment longer, then turned on her heel and was gone.
“You should touch it,” he whispered.
“I can’t,” I whispered back.
“You did on the ship, without asking.”
His voice whistled in my ear.
“We were alone then.”
“We were not alone. All around us were tens of men who watched my pretty wife walk up and down the deck—”
“Emmanuel!”
“And still I had her all for my own. But in my own house, she won’t touch it.”
“I would,” I hissed, “but they can hear every word.”
He rolled his head back on the pillow, looked at the gap in the ceiling above us.
“They are asleep.”
“I can hear them breathing.”
“I did not take you for a nervous one, Libertie.”
“I am not nervous.”
“Nerves will not do well in our life here.”
“I am not nervous.”
“I thought you had a strong temperament.”
“I do.”
“Then prove it on me. Kouche.”
He took my hand in his, guided it between his legs, where he wished it to go. I did not think I would ever get used to that. The wonder of it—rigid in my hand, not like any other organ. It was a curiosity. I had seen between the legs of more women than I could count, but this, this was strange. It was almost as if it did not belong on a body. As if it was some kind of a prank. I pulled my hand away from his, pressed hard on the end of it to see what he would do. He groaned. Why Mama hadn’t told me of this, in all her anatomy lessons, the little bit of power here, I did not know. I wished that I could discuss it with her, or with someone. I could not even write it in a letter to the Graces, I thought. They would not understand.
Beneath my hand, Emmanuel was very slowly thrashing his legs under the sheet, as if the fit itself was luxurious. He was whispering something, too, low and deep: “Bon lanmou, bon lanmou, bon jan love.”
“Emmanuel!” It was another hiss, higher than Emmanuel’s voice, that seemed to fill the whole room.
His legs immediately stilled, but he could not calm his breathing.
“Emmanuel!” That hiss again, so shrill.
He put his mouth close to my ear.
“Go to the door,” he gasped. “If you do not, she will try the lock. She won’t leave till you answer.”
“Who?”
“Just go! Hurry!”
When I opened the door, Ella was before me. In the light of the candle she held, her face was haggard and overly pale, as if the muscle beneath her skin was inlaid with lime. She did not tie her hair up for bed, like any other Negro woman would. Instead, she had set on top of the mass of it a yellowed nightcap, which threatened to slide off of it all.
She jumped back slightly when it was I who opened the door. Then she recovered.
“Is Emmanuel all right?”
“Of course, he is,” I said. “Why would you think he was not?”
“I heard strange noises. As if he was in distress.”
“He is not.”
She sighed, exasperated, then strained her neck, as if to see around me.
“Emmanuel, did the food not agree with you? You have been so long away—”
“I am fine, Ella,” he called back.
“Are you sure?”
“He is fine,” I said, and made to close the door.
“You do not know him as I do. He has a sensitive stomach. Anyone making noises like that cannot be well.”
“You could not know what those noises meant. You are not married,” I said without thinking.
She breathed in heavily at that, so much so that her candle flame shook. I looked at her, aghast at what I had said.
“Ella, I apologize …”
But she turned and made her way back down the hall. I watched the back of her, the nightshirt and the wobble of the flame as she walked. I did not want to face Emmanuel.
When I turned back around, he was still in bed but sitting up on his elbows. He was grinning.
“I knew you were the right one,” he said. “I knew you were not nervous.”
“Your sister now hates me.”
“It does her good.”
“It doesn’t do me any good to have her hate me.”
“Ignore her. She doesn’t matter.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. Only we are twins, but we have not shared the same life for a very long time. Not since we were children.”
“What does that mean?”
“Come back,” he said, “and I will whisper it to you.”
I returned to bed. I pulled my knees up to my chin and turned away from him. He pressed at me for a few minutes, pleading. “It is not so bad, Libertie. She will understand in the morning.”
But I stayed tucked into myself, even after I heard him turn over onto his own side, his hands moving fast, before he thrust one arm over to grab at my shoulder and then fell asleep.
I dreamt that night that a million tiny white feathers broke through the skin of the palms of my hands, and when I waved, I felt the breeze flow through them. When I awoke, Emmanuel was gone and his side of the bed was already cold. From the looks of the sun, it was still early in the morning. I had not been so derelict as to sleep in. I dressed as quickly as I could and opened the door, and tiptoed down the hallway and to the stairs. There was no sound of Ella or Bishop Chase. Or even Emmanuel.
The foyer was empty. Bishop Chase’s office was empty. I went to stand in the dining room, to look through the windows at the back courtyard. A group of children played there—a few in burlap shirts, another few completely naked, none in pants or shoes. They were slapping their hands together and shouting. I could just hear a bit of their song.
Li se yon esklav ki damou
Li se yon esklav ki damou
Li se yon esklav ki damou
Libète moun Nwa!
<
br /> They sang it a few more times before I recognized, with a start, my own name. I turned away from the window, my cheeks burning, and moved through the rest of the house.
In the sitting room, Ella was already composed on the lone divan—a battered wooden structure with the horsehair falling from the bottom. Emmanuel sat at the table, writing. Ella was bent over some sewing in her lap.
“There she is!” Emmanuel called, and put down his pen to come and press my hands into his. Ella would not look up.
“Good morning,” I said, to both of them.
“My love, I must go see Monsieur Colon, my mentor here in Jacmel. I have not seen him in so many years, and he would be offended if I did not see him first.”
“I will come with you.”
“It is not necessary,” he said.
I looked from his face to Ella’s bent head and back again. I narrowed my eyes.
“You will go with Ella and Ti Me to market. When I return, we can begin to unpack the things for my office,” Emmanuel said. “Monsieur Colon is a very intelligent man. But he is suspicious of women, especially a woman as beautiful as my wife. I will have to be gentle with the news of our marriage.”
“He, at least, warrants that consideration,” Ella said to the sewing in her lap.
“You will be happier here, Libertie, than coming with me.”
I said nothing, only glared at him.
“You will have time enough to meet the rest of the neighborhood. Half of them know you are here already. Did you not hear the song the children have already made up in your honor?”
I shook my head.
Emmanuel smiled and began to snap his fingers, slightly out of time. “Li se yon esklav ki damou, li se yon esklav ki damou, li se yon esklav ki damou, Libète moun Nwa! Which means, of course, that I am a slave of love to my black Libertie.”
My eyes shot through with pain as I felt tears form, but I forced myself not to cry. He looked at me expectantly.
“Very clever,” I murmured.
“Ha! You will learn. Anything here that happens at midnight is known by dawn. And by morning, the neighborhood has turned it into a song.”
He bent his head to kiss my fingers. I bent my own to meet his.
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