“Please don’t leave me with her,” I whispered.
“I thought you were brave,” he murmured back.
And then he was gone.
I turned to Ella, who had not moved from the divan. I sat down, primly, on Emmanuel’s chair.
“What are you sewing?” I said.
She unbent her head and looked at me. She held up a lady’s jacket—black fabric with red thread she was embroidering. The embroidery was so thick and close together in some places that the jacket looked crimson. In others, it was nearly black, with only a bit of red curled over.
“Very nice,” I said.
“You cannot possibly understand it.”
“It is a jacket.”
“Yes, but you can’t know it.”
I frowned. “I do not understand,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said. She set aside the jacket, as if in a rush. “We must get to market.”
“Ti Me!” she called suddenly. “Ti Me!”
Ella and I sat there in the quiet. She glared at me, her nostrils flaring slightly. Today, her hair was pinned up, but two tendrils framed her face. One still held the paper curler she must have put in last night, after she left our bedroom. The other was valiantly trying to hold on to a curl but was losing in the humidity of Haiti.
Ti Me was slow to come, but she finally appeared in the doorway.
“Mademoiselle,” she said.
“We must get to market, Ti Me. Honestly. Fwi a ap gate. We will be left with nothing. Papa must not be made sick paske nou parese.”
“Wi, mademoiselle.” Ti Me looked from me to Ella. “Just let me get my basket first,” she said.
The market was a kingdom of women. All around me, old women were bent with produce loaded onto their backs, baskets topped with the green fringe of sweetgrass. Some of the old women had gray skirts; others, blue and yellow ones. There were younger women, too, who walked faster, hips rolling, legs spread wide, hurrying past. And children. There were children everywhere—some clothed, some naked, all barefoot. I had thought, back home, with my mother and Madame Elizabeth and Lenore all around, that I was dark. But here, shining in the sun, I saw women with skin the color of the night sky.
The sound of the market so loud it was nearly unbearable, but it was sweeter than the silence in the Chase household. It was the hum of a hundred women talking and laughing and trading and gossiping, to make the day run. Every woman, it seemed, was calling out to the others, “Maren, maren!” It was the one word I knew, the one I had learned from weeks on the boat. Sailor, sailor, the women were shouting. But when I asked Ti Me and Ella about it, Ti Me opened her mouth to answer and Ella cut her off.
“You’ll notice, the Haitian women are not very chaste,” she said. “And it all stems from that. All of this does. All of this chaos around us.”
Ti Me closed her mouth and drew ahead of us, the basket balanced on her head. She had left this conversation.
Ella followed my gaze. “Oh, Ti Me would agree with me,” she said. “It is part of Papa’s work, to bring a civilizing force to this great country. Look.” Ella pointed one pale finger. Behind us, the mountains rose, impressive and lush and green. “This country could be rich. But a country is only as wealthy as its wives and mothers. You will see.”
I was not sure how the same home could produce an Ella, so full of spite her fingers shook at the mountains around us, and an Emmanuel, for whom the very same mountains brought tears to his eyes. I could not make sense of it, and I knew asking Ella directly would not get any response I could understand. It was a question for the night, for the space of time held between two bodies in bed—the one place in this country, I was learning, where I could speak the truth. Emmanuel, too.
I smiled at Ella in response.
To see her out in the market was strange. She walked like a very proud duck—both ankles turned nearly out, toes pointed slantwise. Every few feet, she swept the hem of her skirt up. I think it was to protect it, but it seemed to swirl up more dust and muck from the road. Ahead of us, Ti Me walked steadily, her own skirts tucked up into her apron to keep them from dragging in the mud. This practicality, perhaps, was what Ella thought of as so unchaste. It was what a man would think, not a woman, who knew how heavy skirts could get with dirt.
Watching Ella, I tried to see where Emmanuel was reflected in her movements. It relieved me that I could not. How could I love a man so much and detest the person closest to him? I thought again of what he had said. That they had not shared a life in a long time. I looked around me at the streets, the women bent over, Ti Me now stopping at a market stall, talking with another woman, a fruit I did not recognize in the palm of each of her hands. She was weighing them. Then she leaned over, spat on the ground. The two women began to argue furiously.
Ella stood watching, her arms crossed over her chest. The little boy at the stall watched, too, occasionally looking up at Ella, trying to read her expression. I caught his eye, and he grinned at me—a genuine smile. I smiled back.
Suddenly the argument stopped. Ti Me shouted, “Madame Sara!” and the other woman began to laugh. She held up her hands, as if in surrender.
Ti Me looked back at me slyly over her shoulder. “Madame Sara,” she said, and then she looked pointedly at Ella to translate. She did not want me to miss the joke.
“It is a type of bird,” Ella said. “It’s very small and yellowish and black and green, and it’s always chirping. You see it around Marchand Dessalines. She called the market woman that because she, too, is small and always chirping, and she goes from one town to another to sell, always talking, talking. The Madame Sara can build its nest anywhere, and this woman can sell anywhere, too.”
“It is a kind of compliment, then?”
“Ti Me is too soft,” Ella said.
“She seems to do well.”
“Yes, but you must understand. No one here respects you if you’re soft. You must be hard and righteous to gain respect. Look, there.” She pointed to the other end of the market, where a drawing of the Virgin Mary, sketched on a piece of spare wood in charcoal and mud, hung on a pole over a communal pump. “Popish nonsense like this, everywhere. A whole country that glorifies suffering and not sacrifice. It is a big job, to be here. I hope Emmanuel has made that clear to you.”
“He loves Haiti. He says it is where the future of the Negro race lies.”
“He is not wrong. If we can ensure the right kind of Negro is here, he is not wrong.”
“No one born here is the right kind?”
“Not without education and hard work. We must make them, too. That’s what you’re here for, I suppose. Why he brought you. Though why he thinks you are good for that, I do not know.”
“I beg your pardon,” I said. But Ella was not so brave as to meet my eye.
Ti Me stopped her bargaining to toss her head over her shoulder and call to us, “Bon manman, bon pitit.” She turned back, picking up the rhythm skillfully, as if there was no interruption.
“What does that mean?” I said.
“It is an old Haitian saying. ‘If the mother is good, the child will be good.’”
I looked away from Ella, back to Ti Me, who was grinning at me now. She winked.
“Mèsi,” I said to her.
“The people here are very fond of proverbs,” Ella said, staring straight ahead. “None of them make sense to me, though. The best proverbs, of course, are in the Bible.”
“But these ones sound very agreeable,” I said.
Ella said nothing, only kept watching the haggle.
When the deal was finally struck, Ti Me looked from Ella to me expectantly. I smiled back, uncertain.
“What is it?” I said.
Ella wouldn’t meet either of our eyes. She looked down at her skirts, and then she stuck one hand to her side and fumbled for her purse there. She unhooked it from her belt and handed it to me.
It was soft and heavy in my hands, the coins inside it spreading over my palms. It was like holding a
n animal and feeling about on its belly for its organs.
“I suppose,” Ella said, still without looking at me, “that you should hold this now. Since you are now the first lady of the house. The purse and keys are yours.”
Her voice was halting, and strangely high-pitched, as if someone else was forcing the words out of her with a pair of bellows.
“It is not necessary,” I began, thinking that if I could spare her this humiliation, perhaps I could win her favor.
But her eyes flashed at me, and I understood it at once. Don’t you dare pity me. The likes of you could never pity me.
What had Ella herself said? You must be strong, in a place like this?
I took the purse and stepped in front of her and counted out the coins, one by one, to Ti Me’s hand, and when we reached the house, it was I who drew the big iron key from my waist and turned it in the door and let the other women inside.
I thought the keys at my waist would change things. Emmanuel led me to believe it was so. When he saw them there at dinner, his eyes became bright, and later, alone in our room, he held each one in his hand, one by one, only the length of the key between us as he worked them off their ring.
“The keys used to fascinate me as a boy,” he told me. “Ti Me wore them until Ella was old enough, and the sound of them, when Ti Me walked, the sound of their clanking, meant that we were safe. I was scared of this country then. I had not learned to love it yet. I wanted to lock it out all day and all night, and hearing the keys hit Ti Me’s hip made me feel safe.
“I learned,” he said as he let one key fall against my thigh and picked up another, to work off the ring. “I learned, as I learned to love this place, that the keys were an illusion. Why would you live in a place as beautiful as this and lock out the night sky? I promised myself that if they were ever given to me, I would exorcise their power. When we were sixteen and I found out that Ella got the keys because she was now the woman of the house, I was heartbroken. And she would never let me touch them, because she knew I meant to strip them of their power.”
He picked up the last key, began to work it off the ring. “But I have something even sweeter. I have this day, where I see the keys at the waist of my wife,” he said, “and you are mine, and I am yours, and it makes the fact of that even more real to my family.”
He led me to our bed, where he gently pushed my shoulders till I lay on my back, and lifted my skirt. He placed each key, warm from his shaking hand, across my bare stomach, while I whispered that he should stop moaning—his father and sister could clearly hear him.
But his ecstasy over those keys did not keep him close to me. The next morning, Emmanuel left at dawn, as he had taken to doing. He spent his days on an endless round of visits. To his mentor, the one other doctor in town. To his father’s friends and associates—the men who made up the American Negro colony in Jacmel. Sometimes, he came back to the house very late at night, even after his father had eaten and retired to bed.
I was left to spend my days with Ella and Ti Me and the bishop. I say “days,” but it may as well have been the same day, over and over again, so little did it change. Ella was always awake before I was, even if, in the dark, Emmanuel and the rooster crowing outside woke me. She spent her mornings working at her embroidery in the parlor—her incomprehensible jacket. Around ten, she would stow it away in a basket she kept underneath the battered divan, and we would all go to the market.
Ti Me went to the same stalls each day and made the same bargains. I realized on the fourth day, from the rhythm of their voices, that this was not so much an argument but a friendly conversation. Sometimes, Ti Me said something quick and low that made the woman laugh and made Ella blush and sniff about morals. I wished then, more than anything, that I could understand. Always, at the end of it, both women turned to me—Ella sullenly, Ti Me with clear amusement at the awkwardness it was causing her—for the coins in the purse at my side.
We returned to the house for the hottest part of the day. Ella took to her room. She said she could not withstand the heat of the tropics, despite having lived there from childhood. Sometimes, I went upstairs, too, but I grew restless lying beneath the sheet, the shutters closed against the heat, listening to the world outside slow down.
When the world began moving again in the late afternoon, it brought the American women of the colony over to the house. There were about ten of them in total—wives of the men who had followed Bishop Chase, the helpmeets of traders and farmers—all of them with the same pale skin as Ella, not a black one among them. The darkest was a very thin woman with yellow skin and no husband, who taught the Haitian women in a kind of domestic academy.
They would all arrange themselves around Ella, who would lead the conversation, usually begun by relating an imagined indignity suffered in the market. The untrustworthiness and the untapped potential of Haitian women was the main topic of conversation. How great the country could be, it was agreed, if only those women understood their place in a chaste home. Instead, they wandered to market and upset the order of the world.
Like Ella, none of these women had been to America for a very long time. The America they described was a kind of dream, where Negro people lived in perfect harmony, with kind and just laws, and every Negro woman stayed home to stitch counterpanes while her husband entered the world. I could not tell if they had been so long gone that they really believed this fantasy to be true, or if it was a collective fiction they engaged in together to pass the time, but to hear it made me wish to scream.
I attempted, once, very early on, to set them right. I told them of the red marks the whites had left on our doors. I said, “There are men following the law right now whom white men string up on trees for exercising their rights.”
There was a pause in the room. One woman covered her mouth. Another murmured, “Mercy.”
Ella did not even look up from the sewing work in her lap. Her hands moved the needle in and out of the fabric, humming like a cicada. “But there is justice in America,” she said. “It will be set right. Here, Negroes cut down other Negroes for politics, too. It is our own against our own. In America, we are not so uncivilized as that.”
I very nearly rushed across the room and ripped the embroidery from her hands. Instead, I stood and left, and I made it a habit to do so every afternoon, when I had sat long enough to be deemed polite. The only thing that saved me was the knowledge that the world my husband was building, that I was sure I would soon join him in building, was bigger than what Ella or those women could possibly imagine. I held this knowledge close to me and it cooled me in the middle of these endless, turgid afternoons, as if I had pressed a wet cloth to the back of my neck.
At some point during each discussion, a woman would excuse herself to go to Bishop Chase’s door, by prearrangement. “I forgot,” she would say, “the bishop asked to see me,” and she would get up, and none of the other women in the room would meet her eye, and Ella, especially, would double down in her viciousness as soon as the woman took her leave.
It was always the darker women, or, I should say, the less pale ones who went, and I thought that was what made Ella rage. She had the worst case of colorstruck I’d ever seen, and I figured it was so bad she was even begrudging these women the chance to talk a little salvation with her father in his library. I pitied her for it, and it made me even more wary of her.
The bishop himself avoided both Ella and me, and Ti Me, though he was home when we were, more often than not. He still did not say a word to me directly. Sometimes, he let his eye rest on the fold of my skirt or my apron and he frowned in disapproval, but he never spoke. It was strange to live in a man’s house and serve his son and not speak to him, but I thought of Mr. Grady—how shy he had been, how he had avoided speaking to me then—and I thought it must be the same with the bishop. But I did not respect the bishop or yearn to know him half as much as I had Mr. Grady. I thought of him more as an example of the worst parts of Emmanuel, and it was a relief that he did not t
ry to talk to me. Seeing him made me scared of the kind of man my husband could possibly become. And I did not want that for him. For no one was loved in that neighborhood more than he, and it was through this love that everyone else—that is, our Haitian neighbors, not the sour-faced American women who followed Ella’s whims—said my new name with respect and pride.
“Madam Chase, se madanm mesye Emmanuel!”
I had always thought titles were silly. Or rather, the only one to be respected was “Doctor.” But I took an inordinate, stubborn pride in my new name, in the name I was now called in the streets when I walked to market with Ti Me and Ella. Madame Chase, Madame Chase, Madame Chase.
“Call me that, please,” I said, teasing Emmanuel at night, and this delighted him almost as much as the iron keys on my naked body.
“You know, Madame Chase,” he said, “it is a kind of work, to call things by their true names. To change their names.”
“A kind of work?”
“That is what we call the practice of Vodoun when it is done. A work. It is an industry for the spirit. It is a task of repair. And it can be as simple as giving something its rightful name. As I have and as the streets have done for you. And, look, you embrace it. And so we will be right.”
I wanted, so badly, to believe him.
Dear Libertie,
I feel it is time to speak plainly. There is no reason not to anymore. I have tried, as your mother, to only speak to you the truth, to remain impartial, to have you grow up with a love as pure as justice. But what good has that done? You’ve still chosen the flesh, anyways. So let me be fleshy, here, with you, since it makes no difference.
I miss you more than I thought possible. It was different when you were gone to school, and I was sure you would be returned to me. But you have passed over into a divide where I do not believe you can ever come back fully. And I mourn your passing.
When your father died, I spent three weeks in bed. Nearly in bed. I was alone in the house—my own father had passed a year before. Reverend Harland came to see me only once. But when he came, I was sitting up in bed, my mouth open wide in a scream with no sound coming out. I scared him in my grief. The Reverend has never been a brave man. The only other person to come see me was Lenore, who came every few days to hold her hand over my open mouth, to make sure I was still breathing, and to bring biscuits, hard as stone, from some of the women at church.
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