The church was Emmanuel’s father’s greatest pride. A stone building with rough windows dug out of the walls and a high ceiling. There was only one cross in the whole place, he liked to point out. No idolatry here.
We sang hymns in English first, then the Kreyòl translations. Bishop Chase strongly discouraged any hand clapping. “Americans can take it,” he said, “but it excites the Haitians too much.” So the songs swelled, but there was always some large piece missing.
It was nothing like when the Graces sang. It was nothing like when we sang at home in Kings County. It did not look like any fellowship I had known, but the bishop was proud of it, and much of the time spent in church was giving thanks for his intelligence, his humanity, and his hard work here.
Ella did not approve of our swimming lessons. She said it was an affront to the Lord’s day. But Bishop Chase said it was up to a man to decide how he and his wife would spend the rest of the Sabbath, and so Ella only complained once. When we left for the mountains, though, she’d make it a point to get on her knees in the parlor and continue her prayers.
The bishop continued to say nothing. But after the third swimming lesson, the priest began to preach from Ecclesiastes, about the wife cleaving to her husband’s family, about the obedience of marriage. Bishop Chase sat behind him the whole time, in his heavy robes in the heat, not even succumbing to it by fanning himself, as the others did. He was silent, looking straight ahead at some life that none of us could see.
I would reach for Emmanuel’s hand while the priest spoke, if only to show some little sign of defiance, and he would take mine, but just for a moment. Then he would set it back down on the pew between us. Even that small rebellion was too much in his father’s church, though when I would ask him about it, in our bed at night, he would say, “It was hot, Libertie. Too hot to hold hands.”
Libertie,
I have received the notice from Cunningham College. And I understand, now, why you married that silly boy in haste.
I am so angry with you. And you are not even here to rage at! What a clever trick you played on me, my girl. What a lesson you learned at mine and Elizabeth’s knee … the lesson of escape! You turned something so good and righteous against me. You’ve used it to your own earthly ends. I cannot think of a more wicked girl than you, and you know I’ve known my share. You are a deceiver. You are an escape artist. You are a liar.
You chose that man over doing the hard and right thing.
You chose indolence and lust over hard work and humility.
I have no doubt that Emmanuel Chase believes that he loves you. I think you have convinced yourself that you love him. But you know and I know that what you have done is wrong and you have ruined our dreams, your dreams, for what you think is love.
It is not love, Libertie.
Love would not make you think you had to flee your only mother.
You will probably never answer me now. You will probably continue to ignore my letters to you. So be it! So be it! So be it! Know that I hold this against you, though, Libertie. Know how you’ve made your mother rage.
You sat in my waiting room and looked down your nose at me and told me I was not trying hard enough. That I did not understand how to change the world.
You sneered at the white women I courted to keep you in nice dresses and pay for your classes. You stopped only short of calling me a traitor, and it is you who have betrayed me! Who has broken me. Who has deceived me. Who stood before me in a wedding gown and said, “I love you, Mama.” Who gave up your virtue to a silly man so that you would not have to face the truth with me. I see it now.
So all is lost. So you have chosen that life, irrevocably. Do you know a part of me still held out hope you would find your way back to this path? That if I let you go, you would return? But you were already gone, long gone, and did not even bother to tell your mother of it.
You are a fool, and so am I.
Your
Mama
This letter came on a Sunday, after church, and when I read it, it went with the others in the back of the drawer, and I almost cried, I did, that she knew the worst part of me.
But Emmanuel called me down to dinner, and he put his hands on my shoulder and he said, “What is wrong?”
And I was still good to him, in his eyes, so I said, “Nothing,” and I resolved I would not answer my mother again. Not for a long time.
When you learn to swim, your body is no longer your own. It becomes enthralled to another dimension, that of the water. Your limbs are weightless, but you can feel your hair and clothes becoming heavy.
“Do you open your eyes underwater?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said.
So while I practiced floating, I imagined him just under the surface, eyes open and staring up at me. I was not sure, in that moment, which one of us possessed the other.
This will always be our life together, I told myself as I followed him back down the mountain. I truly believed, then, that this was the start of the world he had promised me. I thought of our time in the pool as his gift to me. During the week, he still would not permit me to join him in his medical work. He said he was not ready yet. Monday mornings in the empty house became easier, though. Ella and I sat side by side or walked to the market together, but my spirit was still on the water.
“You are not so different from me,” Ella said after a few weeks of this. She sat in the parlor, with her embroidery still on her lap.
“I do not think I am so different,” I lied.
“You do. You think you are better than me,” Ella said. “Pride is not attractive on a woman.”
“I assure you, I am humbled.”
“Fanm pale nan tou de bò bouch yo.”
“What does that mean?” I said.
“Three months, and you still have less of a grasp on the language than a baby.” Ella still had her head bent over her sewing.
I closed my eyes. Willed myself to remember floating on the water.
“What is it that you’ve worked on for so many weeks?” I said finally. “Surely you are done?”
She lifted her head. She slit her eyes at me. Then she held up what was in her lap. A jacket, which she held by the shoulders and gave a good shake so that it uncrumpled.
I got up from my seat and went to sit beside her. “May I?” I said.
She nodded.
I took the garment in my hands and turned it over. Close embroidery in that bright red thread. I held it nearer to my eyes. It was words. An incantation. Maybe even a history. I could only make out a few of the words, but I realized she had embroidered a whole story on this jacket in Kreyòl.
“What does it mean?” I said.
“You are like a child, always asking that.”
I stuck my thumb into my mouth and hummed, like a baby would. I had the satisfaction of startling her into a laugh.
“Your estimations are always correct, Ella.”
“Stop.”
“I am an infant and, as such, would be delighted if you schooled me in this.”
She looked at me. I raised my thumb back to my mouth. “All right,” she said. “He hasn’t told you, has he, yet, of the bad year we had here?”
“When your mother and brothers passed. Yes.”
“He has not told you, though, what else happened?”
“No,” I said.
“We were thirteen,” she said. “We had been here three years. We knew the language so well by then. There was a great crime, in Port-au-Prince. We lived there then—we had not yet come here to build the church in Jacmel. A man had sold his niece to the Vodoun priests, and they had slit her throat and drained her blood and drank it and ate her flesh. The government investigated and brought the bad people to justice. We watched them burn in the capital square. Ti Me, my brother, and I. We saw God’s law that day. It was extraordinary. Emmanuel fainted, and Ti Me kept saying, “It is not right.” She stayed at the square till the last of the embers died down. I think she was waiting for som
ething. I do not know what. My brother was very upset. He said it was a tragedy. That they should never have burnt those terrible people. He still says it was a tragedy. He wrote to me about it, even when he was with you, in New York. So I began to make this for him. To remind him of the true history. I wrote it—see, I stitched it in thread. So he will always remember.”
As she spoke, she’d taken the jacket from me and fanned it over her lap. She ran her fingers over the stitches, again and again, as if she was mesmerizing herself. The thread was red and ragged, from her touching it over and over, and the jacket itself, which had started out white, I think, was a dun gray. It was like a child’s rag doll, pulled apart by the child’s own desire. But Ella treated it like a prize.
I was not sure what to do, until Ti Me came to the door to say “Market.” And then Ella tucked the jacket up and put it underneath the divan, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Oh, I thought. Oh. I saw now her stiff, irregular hair, her rigid dress. That she should know something of Emmanuel that I did not, even now. That he should hold this in him and only share it with her, and not with me, his wife. That he would not tell me this. I felt furious.
When Emmanuel and I made it back to the water, I was ready.
“I did not think there was anything to tell,” he said. By now, in our lessons, I had learned to wear a pair of old bloomers and one of Emmanuel’s undershirts. He swam in the nude. I had become afraid that someone—a woman coming to wash her laundry in the dusk, a child looking for frogs in the mud—would find us, but Emmanuel seemed to almost relish the thought.
“You would not tell me about seeing those people burn?”
“You can’t … She doesn’t … You cannot always trust what Ella says.”
“She told me she longs to burn heretics at the stake.”
“She took our family lessons in differently.”
“What does that mean?”
“She is different than me. She has been for a long time. I did not want to tell you at first. It is painful, and then I worried you would treat her poorly.”
I was standing in the pool, just at the depth where the water reached my calves. Emmanuel, kneeling in the water, lay back. He said, to the darkening sky above us, “She was not always this way. Papa says she is mad, but I don’t believe it is so.”
I sank down into the water beside him. “I don’t understand why you did not tell me there was something wrong with your sister.”
“We made a pact, when she began to … began to …” I had never seen Emmanuel halt for words, except when we were together in the dark, but he did so now. “When Ella began to … talk like that. Father and I agreed. There is no one here to treat her. They do not have madhouses in Haiti. And I would not put her in one anyways—because she is not mad, I do not think. And if we were to bring her back to America, where would she live? She is best here. She is best at home. I convinced Papa of that. And if I can find something to ease her burden, then I will have done my duty by her.”
“So you expect me to live beside her?”
“She is harmless.”
“She spends all day dreaming of seeing men burn at the stake.”
“She is. She seems to have taken a disliking to you, but she would never outright hurt you.”
“You choose her over me,” I said. “Every time.”
Emmanuel had not stopped looking at the sky. He said now, “I cannot believe you would believe that. When I’ve shown and said so many times to you that you are my life.”
I heard him turn in the water. “Do you want to know what she really is to me? Ti Me says she is like this because our family did not serve us well. The very first words Ti Me said to Ella and me when she saw us were ‘Marasa yo rayisab.’ Twins don’t get along. Especially if they are a boy and a girl. The boy will always prosper, while the girl will suffer. Ti Me is a fatalist, like everybody here. But she believed she could help us a little. She wanted to take us to a houngan, to meet lwa yo, to set it right. Ella refused to do any of it. Even at thirteen, she called it ‘popish magic.’ Ti Me says that that is when we lost her, and that Ella will not return to us as long as she is so stubborn.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Ella has always been like that,” Emmanuel said carefully. “When we were children, she was given to fits of weeping. But then, I was, too. And we had so much to cry over—leaving America and coming here, and being hungry the first year while Father set up his ministry. We thought we hated Father then. And then Ma was gone. And then everyone else.
“Ti Me, when she came to us, she would make sure the colors of our clothes were identical, that our plates always had the same number of yams. Sometimes, if I was in the kitchen with her, I would see her switch our plates around, so that I was given Ella’s portion and Ella was given mine. I did not understand it. I said, ‘Why do you do this?’ And Ti Me said that was how you handled twins. She said because we were twins, we were very powerful and prone to resentment. That we must be satisfied and watched for jealousy. That our mother had not known to do so, and look what misfortune had befallen the family. Our poor mother had refused to learn the laws that govern the spirit here. She did not do her duty, and that is why she and our brothers died when they set foot on this land. And Ti Me said she would try to make it right.
“When Ella heard all that, it only made her cry harder. We used to cry together, Ella and I, spend whole afternoons crying over the books Father made us study. But I was young enough that I thought maybe Ti Me could be right. Our first Christmas here was spent with Father and the other mission families, on our knees in the sun, praying to God. That afternoon, Ti Me told us she knew what would make us feel better, and that if we wished to feel happy again, we would come with her when she called us. And she did, later that night—Father was asleep, and Ti Me came to our room and called for both of us. I went right away. Ella only followed because I went first. I remember her in her nightshirt, her eyes wide in the dark, staring straight ahead in fear.
“Ti Me took us out of the city—we walked in the dark for what felt like hours. Ti Me was like our mother, but she was only a few years older than the two of us. So we were all children and able to walk far. I remember the moon was so bright and high above us—it looked like a rib bone, curved into the sky. I would look up at it when my feet were tired. We walked on the road out of Port-au-Prince, and then Ti Me turned down a path into the forest, away from the shoreline. We walked again there, in the dark, with the leaves pressing up on my skin. Ti Me is like my mother, I’ve told you so many times, but she is not a very affectionate girl, and when I began to cry at the brush of leaves, she only sighed and told me to walk faster. Ella kept whispering to me, ‘We will be sacrificed, and it will be your fault.’
“We walked and walked until we made it to a small house, made out of woven grass, and a clearing. There was a pole in the middle, and tens of people sitting and standing, laughing, talking, greeting one another. There were maybe five or six children younger than me, awake that late, on their mothers’ laps or riding their older sisters’ hips. There were old people and young. A few women and men in white shirts, and white scarfs tied to their heads. Torches all around to illuminate their faces. It did not look like any kind of solemn ceremony. It looked more like what a picnic did back in America, except it was happening in the middle of the night in a clearing, with someone’s dog running happily back and forth and in among the people. Someone was even passing around slices of fruit. When we got there, Ti Me had us squat down on the ground alongside some other children our age. It was only as I looked at them more closely in the light from the torches that I saw how many pairs of twins were there. Boy twins. Girl twins. A few that were boys and girls, I guessed, like me and Ella. We sat and waited.
“We had left the house probably at midnight. By the moon in the sky, I would guess we sat and waited for another hour or so. I began to yawn, and Ti Me reached out her arm, so I could lie against her shoulder.
&nb
sp; “Then the music began—you haven’t heard it yet. It’s like the drums of heaven.”
“There are no drums in heaven,” I said.
“You’re wrong, Libertie.” Emmanuel still was not looking at me. He still was speaking to the sky.
“I saw the men and women in white walk in a circle around the pole, swaying in time, the women each holding a lighted candle. Sometimes, in their march, they would stop to twirl. Sometimes, a man would come up to them and press his forehead to theirs, and then both, man and woman, would twist around each other, only their brows touching.
“I watched it all,” he said, “but Ella hid her face.”
“They had a brown-skinned kid goat and a speckled hen. They slit the throats of both and then cooked them, and then put them in a jug with three mouths and offered it to the Marasa. These are the spirits of twins.
“When the spirits had eaten, a woman came and gathered up the meal and put it in a wooden basin. She balanced the basin on the top of her head and walked around the pole three times. Then she took the basin off her head and showed it to each of us, to all the children sitting around. She kept asking us, ‘Èske li bon?’ When she got to me and Ella, I nodded.
“When she’d showed the food to all the twins present, she took the basin off her head, cast it down, and commanded us to eat. Ti Me told us to eat as much as we liked, until we were satisfied, but just to be sure we did not break any bird or goat bones with our teeth.
“It was a mass of all us children, pulling the food up with our hands, pushing it into our mouths. Ella, though, refused to eat. She was too scared to defy the adults outright, but she spit the food into her hands when they weren’t looking. In the frenzy, I ate double her portion, to help her out.
“ ‘Èske ou te manje ase?’ they kept asking. Have you eaten enough? There were many children, but the kid goat had been fat, the hen, too, and the juice ran down my chin. Every other twin’s face shone with grease in the moonlight.
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