Libertie

by Kaitlyn Greenidge

  I spoke to no one except you. I placed both hands on my stomach, and in the quiet of the house I cried to you about your father. How much I missed him. You’d quickened before he passed. I’d held his hand myself over you, where you tossed inside me and rippled the skin on my stomach like a wave.

  So after he was gone, I lay in bed and watched you move inside me, even though I wished the whole world had stopped. In that house made still by death, I knew you would continue, at least. At least I would have Libertie.

  Elizabeth would write to me of her great political awakening. I liked those letters because they burnt with the same passion your father had, for the world to be set right. Elizabeth was learning so much then—about how slaves really lived, about what our own lives would be like if we had not been born free. I am ashamed to say I had not thought of it before. Even with your father whispering revolution in my ear, I only thought of colored people as the most cursed race in the world. I thought we were merely unlucky. I thought it was a matter of luck. I had read the stories of daring escapes, heard the old ones speak, seen the haunted eyes of our newcomers, and was only glad it wasn’t me.

  Your father did not talk of his life before he was free. He would not tell me even what town he ran from, only that he had lived for a spell in Maryland, and for some time in Virginia. Who his people were—his mother, his father, his sisters and brothers—he would not tell me, and in the flush of love I did not press him. I saw how asking made his eyes sad. Besides, I told myself, our life together shared a different fate. He had found me, with my bright skin and farm and money and profession, and he would be safe always, because I loved him. That’s how young I was then. I really believed that.

  After your father died, Elizabeth’s letters told me of the women who came to her, the front of their dresses wet with milk, their daughters snatched from their hands, and I feared that would be me. It would be me. You would be taken from me, and it did not matter that I was freeborn, and it did not matter that I could see the blue veins at my wrist. None of that would keep you safe. That’s what drove me to give aid. And I decided when you were born that I would hide my heart from you, because I worried I would love you into nervous oblivion.

  When you were born, when Lenore raised you up from where she’d placed you on my thigh, the first thing I did was check behind your ears for your true color. And I rejoiced for what I saw there. Because a part of him would live on in the world. That beautiful color. His skin glowed in the sun, like yours did as a girl, as it does now. I could not look at you in your wedding dress—that black black skin against that field of white—because of the glow of it. I had to turn away, you were so overpoweringly beautiful.

  When I saw the color behind your ears, I could no longer deny all the ways you could be taken from me.

  Even I was not secure, and my papa was not secure, in our color, because we were known to be colored and we could have been taken at any time. And if you were taken from me, no white person would believe you were mine—they did not think it was possible that I would prefer your black skin to my faint yellow, that I could give birth to something as wondrous as you.

  The whole world told me you weren’t mine, whenever I held you in my arms outside of our home. And so I grew frightened for you. And I knew what I owed you was very great. I must raise you up to be strong enough for this world. I must teach you how to heal the people in it. Maybe that could save you, I thought. Again, I was still very young then.

  You would not believe me now, but you were a happy baby. Your joy brought something back for me. You will see, when you have your own children—it is as if they are your new eyes and your new heart, and you feel sometimes you can live for a hundred years more, even after all the trouble you’ve seen. You actually want to live for a hundred years more, even knowing how cruel the world is.

  Before you came, I stayed in this world out of a sense of duty only. It was my trust to fix it. I would get weary sometimes. I would think of what your father wanted—Liberia. I would think of what would happen if I had followed his desire to be there. Only a heavy sense of duty screwed my ankles down into Kings Country dirt.

  But through you, I learned to love our land. I saw you learn to walk, first on the floors my own father had cut and sanded, then on the land that he owned. I saw you learn to talk by calling back to the birds in our trees. I saw when you cried, and I held you close. You would look over my shoulder at the hills around us to soothe yourself. I saw the land, my land, through your eyes, and I learned to love it again. And it was not a burden. None of it was a burden. You told me once, in anger, that you must be such a burden to me, and I tell you, Libertie, caring for you has been the greatest honor of my life.

  But I think even now I have failed you, and I am full of sorrow.

  Love

  Your

  Mama

  Ti Me had handed me the letter without any expression. I was sitting with Ella in the parlor, and I’d made the mistake of reading it in front of her. I felt her eyes on me, avidly watching, and I felt my skin become hot.

  “Good news?” she said when I was done.

  “My mother is well,” I said.

  And then I crushed the letter into a ball and held my hand in a fist until I could go to my room, my husband’s and mine, and stuff it in the desk drawer there.

  As if that could save me from it.

  I will write her back tomorrow, I told myself.

  But then I thought of what I would tell her.

  The children here have made up a mocking song about me. Emmanuel’s father did not even know we were married. His sister hates the sight of me. I spend my days surrounded by people, alone. This is what I have chosen, instead of speaking honestly, “fleshly,” as you say, to you, Mama, and fighting to stay by your side.

  “Emmanuel,” I whispered in his ear that night. “Take me away from here tomorrow.”

  He was in my hand, his eyes were closed, he nodded his head back into the pillow, I thought that we still had this, at least, despite everything else, and I felt a little stab of pride.

  But how do you list that triumph in a letter to your mother?

  We rode on his father’s horse, across a wide, flat expanse of no-man’s-land that was full of puddles of water as large as very shallow lakes, that women and children and men walked and ran across and trod across on donkeys, going back and forth from their homes in the mountains to town.

  I could feel the horse breathe beneath me. Every step up the mountain, he took in larger gulps of air. I could feel the ends of his lungs swell. The horse wheezed louder the higher we went. I felt my ears pop as we ascended.

  A wife is like a horse. Laboring uphill with the weight of two people’s love on her back. My skirts were beginning to get damp with sweat. I thought of Madeline Grady, who had looked at me and said with confidence, “Grady reads for both of us.” Where did that surety come from? I should have watched her better, I thought.

  It was one thing to fail as a student. I had told myself I simply did not have the aptitude to be a doctor. That I did not possess that piece of flint that existed in my mother’s soul, which was struck and made light when she had a patient before her. My anatomy was different. I was not built to alleviate the suffering of others.

  But I was surely built to be a wife. Wasn’t every woman? Even Louisa and Experience were built for love. And I felt it for Emmanuel, sometimes so strongly it made me dizzy. I did not realize, though, that I could at the same time be so lonely.

  I pressed my forehead into my husband’s back. “I wish the Graces were here.”

  “Why? So they could make you laugh?”

  “They would at least sing us love songs to cheer us, yes.”

  “They do not sing love songs,” he said.

  “But they do,” I said. “Every song the Graces sang was a love song.”

  “No,” he said.

  “They are. Love is freedom.”

  His ribs shuddered beneath my arms. He was laughing. “You don�
�t know anything,” he said.

  We got off the horse for the last bit. “Wouldn’t it be kinder to tie him to a tree and come back for him?” I said.

  Emmanuel looked ahead, farther up the mountain, then back at me. “If you wish.”

  We left the horse by a bush. I could hear him, even as we walked, behind me, eating leaves.

  Every few twists in the road, we passed a house of one of the families that lived on the mountain. They were set back from the road and made of wood and stone. We could usually hear the family’s rooster as we approached, sometimes a goat in the yard. At each house, a person, usually a woman, would come to the door to watch us pass. If she saw me first, she would frown. If she saw Emmanuel first, she would smile and bow her head.

  Emmanuel called to each, “Bonjou, madam.” Sometimes, a woman would call back, “Monsieur Emmanuel.” But every single one recognized me and called me by my new name, though I had never seen any of them before: Madame Chase, yon fanm ameriken.

  “They know us here,” I said.

  “I come here nearly every day. I have bragged about you so often they know you by my words.” He laughed. “Before I left for America, I used to come here to study.”

  “You would bring your books here?”

  “Sometimes I was studying books. But mostly, I was studying the plants.”

  “You will get used to this walk,” Emmanuel said, taking my hand in his. “You will make it every day with me, once my office is set up again. We will learn this mountain together.”

  “You have a lot of faith in me.”

  “It is not faith,” he said. “I know you.”

  We then walked in silence, and I could pretend for a moment that I was the person he imagined. To get to the water, you had to climb uphill till the backs of your legs began to burn and your knees felt as if they would shake, and your skirts, as they moved around your ankles, felt like a burden. I tucked the ends into the waist of my dress, running them through my legs, which delighted Emmanuel. But I felt annoyance at the walk and the heat that he had not prepared me for. We had left in the afternoon, because he had wished to talk with his father first and we had wanted to miss the highest heat of the day. But the heat had lingered, and even the woods all around us felt oppressive.

  I did not trust his admiration for me. The only person who had ever watched my movements as closely as he did was my mother. And she had watched not with pride, but with a kind of patient assessing. She was waiting for me to make a mistake, and he did not believe a mistake was possible. Yet.

  My mother’s scrutiny was a burden. But this other way of looking, this besottedness, was just as damning. My mother expected great things and constant improvement. He seemed to believe in a perfection that existed apart from my actual self.

  I watched my husband’s slim back as he moved up the mountain. His skin did not brown in the sun, only turned yellow and pink. For this trip, he wore a straw hat with a large brim and a veil of gauze. Ti Me had brought it to him, and they had both laughed about it, a shared joke. His back is muscled, but he is a little man, I thought as he walked ahead of me. It was easy to forget this as we wrestled in bed, as I watched him leave me so many mornings. I thought, I still do not know him, but I think about him at all times, so I suppose it makes no difference if I do or not. It is the same.

  “This is where the women come to wash,” he said. Before us was a small pool, the water shallow. “This is where I learned to swim as a boy.”

  “You swim?”

  “You will, too.”

  He stopped before the bank of the pool and began to take off the ridiculous hat, his shirt.

  “Emmanuel—”

  “The washing day is done. It will be dusk soon. No one will come.”

  He rolled his trousers up and waded into the water. Then he turned to me and held out his hands.

  “There are two other pools above us. The water for this one comes from a waterfall at the top of the mountain. The pool just above us is about seventy-five feet deep. We will move to that one when you are ready. The best pool is at the top, near the fall. It is maybe a hundred feet deep, but the water is so blue you can almost see to the bottom. We will move to that one together. You’ll see.”

  “You are very confident.”

  “Of course.”

  “If I refuse?”

  He smiled. “I will demand it.”

  Following his commands seemed an easier way forward to whatever version of myself he imagined. So I put one foot into the water, then another. I stepped very carefully over to him. I could hear the water as it moved around my feet. If I was quiet, I could hear the clap of the waterfall above us. A deeper sound than the one I had listened for in the puddles and barrels of water back home, when I was a girl and believed in Ben Daisy’s lady. Emmanuel held out his hands for me. I put both of mine in his.

  And then he threw me down.

  The water was not deep enough for me to lose my ground. I went under, onto my knees, but when I raised my head, I broke the surface again.

  He was laughing, truly laughing. I thought, I have misjudged him. I thought, I have made a mistake.

  “This is how my father taught me,” he kept saying.

  I tucked my legs underneath me, sat back in the water. I could feel my skirts filling with the damp, beginning to weigh me down. Emmanuel danced around me, whooping and laughing and splashing. When he got close enough, I held out my hand and pulled his arm, until he was in the water with me.

  He rolled happily in the mud of the pool. But if I could have gotten ahold of him, if I had not been scared of the water myself, I would have held him under. If only for a moment, for him to feel what I felt. How could you be bound to someone, for life, to the grave, and fundamentally not feel the same things?

  I pushed myself up out of the water, but I felt it still dragging at my skirts, nearly pulling me down again. Emmanuel was still sitting in the water, laughing. I slogged to the shore, one heavy step after another. When I got there, I tried to sit first on the ground, then lean against a tree. I could feel my skirts becoming clammy against my legs. I looked up at the sky. The sun was beginning to set somewhere. You could not see the horizon from this pool, just a pink streak across the sky above us. I was a thousand miles away from my mother because I was too much of a coward to tell her the truth.

  In front of me, Emmanuel leaned until he floated on his back. He held his palms out. “This is the first step,” he called. “You must make friends with the water.”

  Around us, it was getting darker. In the dimming light, the dirt road we’d taken to the pool glowed against the shadows of the trees, as if it was lit up from below. I could hear the sounds of birds from far away.

  “Libertie, are you listening to me?”

  “No,” I said. “I am listening to the jungle.”

  “You are angry?”

  “Shh,” I said. “I want to hear the trees.”

  I heard a splash as he sat up. “You don’t understand,” he said. “That’s the way you learn. That’s how my father taught me.”

  “Your father is always right?”

  “In this he is.”

  “You will ignore your father when he tells you how to be a doctor, but if it is about drowning your wife, he is correct.”

  “You’re being dramatic.”

  “Half drowning your wife.”

  “You’ve never wanted me to feel something in the same way you do?” he said quietly, to the water. “That’s all I wish for here.”

  I thought then that maybe we could try to understand each other again. I stood up. I unbuttoned the blouse that stuck to me, stepped out of the skirts that clung to my legs. When I was bare, I walked back into the pool and sat down beside him.

  “Like this?” I set my arms on the surface of the water.

  “Now lean back.”

  If you follow his commands, I told myself, you can become the woman he believes you are.

  I felt the water creep up my spine, around my s
houlders, and lick into my ears. Everything within me wanted to hold tight against it. My head dipped further below the surface, and all sound was gone now—except the sound of my own breath. My mouth and nose were still above the surface, and I took in one more bit of air, which felt warm now, when the rest of me was in cold water. And then I let go and trusted the water, and I was free. I opened my eyes a little bit. I could see the moon above us, and its light reflected, white and shimmering, on the water that surrounded me.

  “Do you think,” I said to Emmanuel, “it’s the same moon over Mama right now? Do you think she is looking at it as I look at it, as I lie on top of water? Do you think she can know me right now?”

  But he was tired of games by then. Or games that did not involve him. He sat up and crashed out of the water.

  He took me to the water every Sunday afternoon. But first, we had to endure the mornings. Those we spent in sweaty prayer with his father’s congregation: the bishop sitting behind the pulpit in his heavy robes, the priest standing up to lead the service, Ella’s sewing circle sitting in the front pews with some of the Haitians who had joined the church early on, and the newest converts always standing in the back of the church.

  No one seemed to question this arrangement, not even Emmanuel, when I asked him about it. “It has always been that way,” he told me. But Ella was more blunt. “They are our brothers in Christ, but they aren’t of our sort,” she said. “The Haitians of our station are lovely, but they remain papists. The ambitious workers here join our church because they know we have schools and aid and help, and they want that for their families. We love them very much and they love us, and we worship together, but we like to be with our sort. Don’t pretend you don’t understand.”

  In our pew sat myself, at the farthest end, closest to the church window; Emmanuel, seated beside me; his sister, beside him; and Ti Me, at the aisle. Once, when we were all supposed to have bowed in prayer, I glanced up to see her neck straight, the only head unbent in all the church.