“All during this, they sang a song. It is the song of the twins,” Emmanuel said. “Should I sing it for you now?”
The only sound was the two of us, shifting slightly in the water.
“Yes,” I said.
He took a deep breath and began.
Mwen kite manman m’ nan peyi
Gelefre
Marasa elou
Mwen kite fanmi m’ nan peyi Gelefre
M’ pa gen fanmi ki pou pale pou mwen
Marasa elou
Mwen pa gen paran ki pou pale pou mwen
Marasa elou
I walked through the water where Emmanuel still lay, churning up swells with each step. When I reached him, I sank down onto my knees in the cold.
“Do you understand it?” he said.
“I think so.” I closed my eyes and began, haltingly.
“I have left my mother in Africa.
“I have left my family in Africa.
“I have no family to speak for me.
“I have no relations to speak for me.”
“Marasa elou,” he said.
I lay back in the water beside him. I began to shiver.
“That’s when I started to believe,” Emmanuel said. “That’s when I understood what this land had for me. Ella is unstable. She has never adjusted to life here. But I have, and I’ve thrived because of what I have taken in. Because of what Ti Me did for us, for me, on that night. That was my introduction to the work, and it is my most cherished act here. Do you understand? Ti Me saved me. The work saved me.”
“You believe it all then? About twins and home and songs,” I said. “And you call your sister mad?”
“Of course I believe it. The new ways here, it’s where the people are free. We cannot be a nation if we don’t have gods in our own image. They made these gods—do you understand? Just as your mother made her place and you made your own. They go further, where we need to. We will never be free until we do as they do.”
“You would believe in magic?”
“I would have us serve the spirits.” He dipped back in the water then, almost gone under, but then I saw he was pulling himself out, to look at me.
“I had thought you would understand,” he said. “I wish my father would understand. I think Ella, in her own way, does understand. It’s why she is so frightened of it all. She knows there’s power there, but she isn’t sure what kind. I believe we will not become a people until we have gods that understand us.”
“You speak in riddles.”
“I have told you from the beginning. This is my ambition. I can bring what I have learned in America and help the people here, with what they already have. I am building a new world. In the new world”—he curled his hand around my wrist, under the water—“we will be equals, you and I. We will be who we wish to be. There will be no limits on what we can dream or what we can do. You believed it when we married, and nothing has changed. Do not let this business with Ella make you think it is not possible.
“I was not forthcoming about Ella, this is true. I worried she would mean you wouldn’t marry me, that you wouldn’t marry into a family with people who were unwell. But everything else I’ve told you about myself should let you know I love you enough to chart new gods for you.”
When we left the rock pool, I was still shivering. Emmanuel walked ahead of me, his back strong and straight, his shirt soaked through. I could just make him out as the night reached up to hold us.
Manman Poul grate, grate jouk li jwenn zo grann li
Mother Hen scratched and scratched till she reached her grandmother’s bones
Libertie,
I was too angry to write again for a long time. I wrote you many letters and burnt each one, because Lenore said they were too harsh.
I am still angry, to think what I have lost and what has been ruined.
This is the life I had imagined for you. That we would have that coach with the gold lettering. That you would carry on my good deeds. That you would be my great act of love in the world and my redemption. My apology to your father for not understanding where he came from. My atonement to our people for failing them over and over and over again, when I couldn’t set them right.
You would be brilliant and set them right. But you are not even right within yourself, I think. And you cannot even understand what I had given you, all I had given you, to prepare you to fight.
They say the Negroes now are a different breed than in my day. The colored people are different. Bolder. And maybe that’s what you are. Not my daughter but a daughter of a different age. Maybe your boldness serves better for these times than my fidelity. Maybe my Libertie is really the clever one, and it is Mama who is the betrayer.
Write to me, Libertie dear, and set your mama straight. Give me your words, please. I cannot take your silence.
Love
Your
Mama
I never wrote her back, because I discovered on Fet Gede that I’d fallen pregnant. That morning, I woke up to the sound of the drums. The drumming was something I had grown used to—it came from the temples that dotted the road to the water basins, and oftentimes, as Emmanuel and I rode back in the dark, we could hear it echo around us, off the trees.
After Emmanuel told me his life’s work, I tried to do my best to make it my own. I had thought it was all poetry—though better poetry than what I’d written for Mama or the woman in the water, because it was inspired by love for me. But it wasn’t just poetry; it was the logic by which he governed his actions and his mind, and I told myself I must learn it if I belonged to him now.
I thought that it explained the long silences between him and his father. I looked at Ella and tried to see her with the compassion that Emmanuel did. Her heat-stiffened hair, her sweaty, pale skin, the way she looked with fear and anger at the women in the market. Love her. Love her. Love her for it, I told myself. But mercy is hard to cultivate, when it’s for a stranger who tells you you’re only as good as what’s between your legs and ignores you for hours on end.
Emmanuel must become your religion, I told myself. Submit to him as you would to any preacher. It is the only way to survive here. He is your helpmeet and your ally.
During the day, I did well enough. I sat near Ti Me in the cookhouse and tried hard to learn the language, enough so that one day I could ask her about the gods she and Emmanuel loved.
But every night, I betrayed him, when I dreamt of being with my mother.
Sometimes, I dreamt I was a girl, working quietly and companionably with her in her study, the heavy smell of camphor around us. Sometimes, I dreamt I was finally driving the black carriage with dr. sampson and daughter drawn in gold on the side. In every dream, Emmanuel, marriage, my desire for him, was forgotten, nowhere to be found. When I woke, I would long for her again, even as Emmanuel’s arm sat heavy across my breast, even as I felt the long naked length of him against my back.
Sometimes, in the dreams, she held me in the softness of her lap, as if I was a child, and swept a gold fan over us.
The drumming that had started all around us that October, that startled me from morning sleep and afternoon rests, was a relief. It shook my head free of grief, and to its rhythm I could sing Love Emmanuel, and so forget my mother.
“The idolatrous Haitians worship the dead,” Ella spat to me, the walls of the sitting room, the sewing in her lap, whenever she heard the drums. Emmanuel had told me that, yes, the dead here held a special place. But what do you call it when you worship a memory of a living person, of one who has never been completely known to you, and when your worship is unwilling, driven not by a desire to honor but because you have realized the world didn’t make sense with her, and does not make sense now that you are without her?
“Fet Gede is their All Souls’ Day, but as with everything outside of America, the sense of humor here is keener,” Emmanuel had told me in bed the night before the holiday. This was his favorite position to tell me stories—while lying down.
“Ella tells me that the men tie skeleton hands to their belts and circle their hips in lewdness,” I said.
“In that, she is not wrong. If there was ever a holy day designed to speak to Ella’s delusions, this is it.”
Already in the night, we could hear music and laughing, louder than usual.
“It is one big celebration for the spirits of those who passed,” Emmanuel said.
“It sounds macabre.”
“It is not.”
“If I went with you, I could see for myself if it is not.”
“But then who would keep the peace with Ella and father?”
In the morning, my bed was empty.
Emmanuel had told me that he would spend Fet Gede with the houngan he was apprenticed to, a leader of a Vodoun house of worship that Ti Me had introduced him to—the very same man who had presided over his own feast of Marasa in the woods, long ago. He no longer hid the purpose of his trips from me.
The other Chases were planning to spend the day in public prayer—a pointed protest of the merriment all around them. I had already missed a chance to see how our neighbors on our street would prepare, because Emmanuel had deemed it more prudent for me to help the women clean the church and wash down the pews in preparation.
“I do not see why I cannot come with you,” I’d said.
“They are already skeptical of my work,” Emmanuel replied. “Your being here at least lets them see that I can be something of a family man. That my project does not exile me from any sort of decent life, which they would very much like to believe. If I were to do this work as a bachelor, they would claim I’d let my brain go foggy through lack of domestic love. If you outwardly assisted, they would claim that I was a corrupting influence on you.
“This way, they cannot discredit my work. Not if my own wife is at the front row of the choir, singing hosanna with everyone else.”
“You have thought of everything,” I said.
“The work is too important not to.” He’d taken it as a compliment.
I took coffee with Bishop Chase and Ella, then waited as Ella went through her three shawls, deciding which one she should wear to service.
“The yellow one, I think,” I said, hoping to goad her.
It worked. She quickly chose her black shawl and gave me a sly look, as if she had been triumphant. I was learning how to manage her, at least, I thought.
I walked with her to service, Ti Me beside us. Ella made a show of covering her ears whenever the drums seemed too close. In church, she threw herself down on her knees before the service even began, and shut her eyes tight. I did not sit beside her. What Emmanuel could not see would not hurt him. Instead, I stood at the back of the church beside Ti Me. It was not even noon, and the room was already too warm.
By the afternoon, my knees wobbled from standing and the noise outside was overwhelming. Bishop Chase raised his voice until he was hoarse, but it did not matter. Outside was a great rush of laughter and footsteps and singing.
I glanced over at Ti Me, who had stopped listening to the bishop altogether. Her face was turned toward the street. The expression on it was one of such open longing I felt a rush of pity. It did not seem fair that Ti Me should also be punished by my husband’s sense of propriety.
I tapped her on the shoulder, and she startled.
I smiled, though, and whispered, “Ou vle ale la?”
She looked at me for a moment, as if deciding something.
I pointed out the doors, where a woman, her face streaked with white powder, her skirts hiked to her hips, was running past, a little boy laughing, trying to keep up with her.
Ti Me nodded, once. I took her hand and walked the two of us out of the church.
As the doors swung shut behind us, I heard the men and women inside begin to rustle, the priest call for us to return, and the whoosh of Bishop Chase’s robes as he stood up from his seat.
I had finally done something to provoke a reaction from him, and I could not stop smiling as Ti Me and I ran through the streets in the sun.
“Ki kote li ye?” I panted. Where is it?
“Simityè a,” she said. The cemetery. And then she squeezed my hand.
The graveyard in Jacmel was a little bit above the city, in the hills, so that the dead had a view of the ocean and the living in the town below them. In those days, it was not as big as it would become, but it was still an impressive place. The graves there were aboveground stone mausoleums. Some had columns and porticos; others were nothing more than solemn boxes with tops to shift off when the dead were buried. It was not like our graveyard back home, with its little pebbles, that I cut the grass from. Who is cleaning father’s grave now that I’m gone? I wondered as we ran.
I thought of my mother, now left to tend two graves alone for the rest of her days, and felt a flush of shame, again—at my hasty marriage, at my foolishness. But I did not have time to feel sorry for myself, because as we drew closer, we were swept up by the crush of people at the cemetery gate, jostling one another, pressing close, hoping to get in and join their friends.
A man stood at the gate, his face dusted in white chalk, a top hat on. On his nose was balanced three pairs of spectacles, all with the glass missing. He had stuffed white cloth into his ears and mouth, like we do whenever we prepare a body for burial. He removed his cloth only to speak in a nasally, high-pitched singsong that I could not understand. Beside him was another man, taller, who was inspecting everyone who came past. All around us, everyone was eager for his scrutiny.
I nudged Ti Me. “Kiyès li ye?”
She snorted. “You talk to me in English. It will be easier.”
“Who is that?”
“Papa Gede,” she said. “And Brave Gede. Papa Gede, he wears the top hat, he is the first man who ever died in this world. He knows what happens to us in the land of the living, and he knows what happens to those in the land of the dead. The man next to him, that is Brave Gede. He guards the graveyard and keeps the dead inside. He keeps the living out. He decides who enters today to play with the dead.”
“Will he let us in?”
Ti Me snorted again. She walked faster, through the crowd. I had no choice but to follow her.
When we reached the gate, the man in the spectacles widened his eyes and the taller man threw back his head. Both of them laughed as we approached and began to yell even louder. But whatever they were shouting did not frighten Ti Me; she began to laugh, too. And both men waved their hands, as if to say You shall pass, and Ti Me stepped boldly into the cemetery.
I tried to follow, but as I did, one of the men yelled something again, in that sharp, nasally voice, so strange.
Ti Me laughed to herself but kept moving.
“Why does he talk like that?” I asked her as I hesitated just past the entrance. I could feel the heat of the crowd pressing against my back.
“He speaks in the voice of the dead,” Ti Me said. “The dead all sound like that.”
“What did he say?”
“I will tell you after, mamselle.”
In the graveyard, people were crowding around two tombs, pressing forward, laughing, singing. Some were resting against the walls of the dead, others placing bowls of food and drink on the tops. “These are the tombs of the first woman who died, Manman Briggette, and her husband,” Ti Me said. “And here is the tomb of the first to die by the hand of man, and there is the first murder. They are all here to call up the dead.”
All around us was the sharp smell of rum. A woman danced past, a jug held high above her head, the liquid sloshing out, down her arm, on her face. Some of it sprayed on me. I coughed when it touched my lips.
“It burns you, eh?” Ti Me laughed again. “Piman needs to be hot,” she said. “You take a whole string of peppers, ten strings even, and mix them with clairin. It has to be hot enough to warm up the dead.”
The woman with the jug stopped a few feet ahead of us, the crowd making room for her as she began to twirl and laugh and roll her hips. She splas
hed the liquid on her chest, poured it over her hands, rubbed it into her face. Someone handed her a long red pepper, and she took that, too, stuffing it into her left nostril. Another went in her ear, where it promptly fell out and onto the ground.
“That woman is ridden by a gede. The spirits found her, and she is their horse. They will move through her body. The dead are cold, but we can warm them up. He needs piman to warm him up.”
The woman began to hunch down lower, to sing and to dance faster. A few people in the crowd joined her, others laughed, and some began singing another song altogether. Above us, the sun hung low in the sky, and I could see, from the cemetery gate, the harbor with the light shining bright over it, the sea turned to waves of white light in the dusk.
I had thought when I came here, I would be able to become a new person. That I would become someone for whom it did not matter that I had failed my mother. And, I supposed, that had happened. I became a wife and a sister and a daughter to people who could not see me. But was that any better than what I had been at home, beside my mother? I thought now, It is useless. I had thought then, It is lost.
I looked at the crowd rejoicing in the graves. The man closest to me pulled a femur bone from on top of one of the tombs and waved it in the air in slow circles. A few people walked with goats on leads or held in their arms. The sound of laughter kept up all around me. It had gone from a shock to a comfort to something that warmed me on the inside, that made my blood beat, that at least told me I was alive.
Ti Me had given up her role as nurse to me and was now standing by herself, watching the men and women sing. Sometimes, she sang along loudly; other times, she kept beat with hand claps.
Perhaps, I thought, I was destined to always be a child; perhaps it was silly to try to be otherwise. I thought of the life that lay ahead of me, a life of doing what my husband whispered to me late at night, of standing beside a Christian madwoman every day in church and pretending that her pronouncements were sane, of sitting across from a smelly old bishop who looked at me as the Whore of Babylon and had not spoken more than twenty words to me since I arrived. I thought of dying here, in this land, never seeing my mother’s face again. I felt it, suddenly, in my chest: I need her.
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