I began to laugh. It did not start as a giggle. It was horrible. My stomach ached with it, my lips hurt from peeling back, and my bones were shaking. I was laughing so hard I could not catch my breath. My smile widened and widened until my eyes were narrowed and I felt the tiny, hot burst of tears at the corners of my eyes. The strangest thing was that I could not hear myself. I could feel the laughter bang in my throat, but in my ears was only the roar of the people around me.
Ti Me turned to look at me—both shocked and amused. “It’s too much for Mamselle,” she said.
“No,” I gasped when I was able. “We stay.” Even in my hysteria, I could see the skepticism on her face. But I wanted to do at least one part of this right.
I sat down on the dirt, against one of the tombs. Ti Me, still looking anxious, stood beside me for a bit.
She knelt down. “Do you want to know what he said at the gate?”
“Who?”
“Papa Gede. He knows everything. He knows who will die and who will be born. He said you are now with child—two, he said. I laughed because I thought he was joking. He likes to make jokes. Rude ones, especially about pretty young women,” she said. “But I think—”
I began to laugh harder. I pressed my back into the tomb and rolled my neck. I could not say then if I wanted release from the moment or to be held in it forever. I was never good at deciding a side.
“No, mamselle, don’t do that!” Ti Me put her hands behind my head, trying to still me. She brushed the dust out of my hair.
“If I am … If I am … If I am,” I gasped, “so be it.”
“Mamselle, you will hurt yourself.”
“I have failed as a daughter, and I do not like being a wife. Perhaps I can be a mother,” I said, and then I began to laugh even harder, until Ti Me raised me up by the elbows, dusted off my church dress, and walked me, very carefully, out of the graveyard and back to my husband’s house.
By the time we arrived, I had quieted down some. I could feel myself hiccoughing, the flutter in my diaphragm. I did not think what Ti Me and that man, whoever he had been, what they said about me—I did not believe it could be true. But by then, Ti Me was convinced. She had me lie down in my bedroom, checked the shutters to make sure they were closed against the street, and set a tincture of ginger leaves and aloe at my bedside, so bitter it made me wince.
The house was empty except for the two of us. I could hear the whisper of the bottoms of Ti Me’s feet as she walked from my room, down the hall, and out to the yard. She had told me she would go to find Emmanuel, but I was not sure that I wished to see him yet.
Even in the heat, Ti Me had draped a blanket over me, and in my exhaustion I had let her. But now I tossed it off and pressed at my stomach, naming each part I imagined I felt through my skin. The liver, the kidneys. I imagined feeling the womb. I had not thought of this part of it, of falling pregnant without my mother there to name everything. I thought of the last day of our journey to Haiti, when we’d thrown the satchel Mama had handed me overboard and toasted to babies to come. I had done it to amuse Emmanuel, to amuse myself, really, by imagining what my mother would think if she could see me then. I had not let it occur to me that any of it could be real.
The world is only consequences, Libertie. I could hear her voice now.
“You do not always have to be right,” I said to the ceiling above me.
There was a flash of light there, the reflection from the bowl of water and herbs Ti Me had left by my side. I watched as the light from the water skipped over the ceiling—back and forth, back and forth. It meant nothing. It meant everything. I was not sure where this thing called a will came from. Mama had it. Emmanuel had it. Even mad Ella, in her obsessions, had a will. But I did not. Would it come when whatever was in me was born? Or did I have a little more time to develop one, before this something else was here?
I began to laugh again, a little weakly. The heat of the graveyard was beginning to leave me. I could feel the sweat cooling on my face. By the time Emmanuel returned, led by Ti Me, both of them panting from running there, I was sitting up in bed, sipping from the bowl of water, in the last little bit of sunlight from the shutters I had thrown open wide.
“You are feeling better, at least?” Emmanuel said, his voice hesitant.
I set down my cup. “There was never anything wrong with me.”
“Ti Me says you took fright.”
“I was only overheated. But I am well now.”
He sat down on the bed, motioned for Ti Me to leave the room.
“She told me what you heard at the cemetery.”
“Do you believe it?”
“It would not be surprising.”
“You do not sound delighted.”
“It is only that there is so much to do, still, for the two of us,” he said. He bent his head. He would not look at me.
He made as if to fall into bed beside me, but I pushed him away.
“You do not wish for this either,” I said.
“There is not much to be done. It was not part of the plan, but I cannot say I can’t see how it could be. Father will be satisfied, at least.”
“He was about to yell at me, last time I saw him.”
“You shouldn’t have fled from the church like that, this is true. You could have left more discreetly,” Emmanuel said. “But he forgave you when I said you might be with child. He remembers what that is like. He said, ‘Women lose their minds when they are carrying. It is their burden.’ But he was pleased. He will be pleased.”
“Is that all?”
“I can see how it could help with a lot of things.”
“I’m to raise it, to have it, here with a grandfather that hates its mother and a madwoman for an auntie.”
“Don’t call Ella that,” he said.
I did not meet his eye. Instead, I looked at the reflection of the two of us in the mirror across from the bed—the back of his neck, red with heat, and my own reflection, dark in the shadows of the afternoon.
“I am not feeling well again,” I said. “I want to rest some more.”
He looked only slightly disappointed. He got up to close the shutters.
“No. Leave them open. The noise helps make the room bearable.”
He tried to smile. “For tonight only,” he said. Then he left me.
When I heard him walk all the way down the hall, I went to the desk and opened the drawer, the one he had told me was mine alone. The letters were crammed in until they tore, the paper crumpled into a fan. I took them out and brought them back to the bed and held them in the cradle of my lap.
Mama’s need was too great. Think of that, I told myself. But who would have thought of that? I’d needed her and needed her and needed her when it was unseemly, and now here was the proof that she’d needed me back.
I tried to read her letters, but the words would not focus. My eyes would not let me take them in. I felt a pressure at my temples and suddenly very, very tired. To recognize that I had become another person for possibly a reason as foolish and flimsy as misunderstanding my mother—it was too painful to bear.
Fragments of the letters swam into clarity.
You do not write
You do not write
You do not write to me
Why?
Libertie
I cannot think of a greater freedom than raising you from a babe in arms to a girl. You were mine, and I decided what you heard, who you listened to, what words formed on your lips. It was intoxicating to have that kind of open dominion over another, even more so because I knew you would grow to become your own person, and that person could be shaped by me.
You do not write to me
And then the letters went back to a blur.
I closed my eyes and rapped my fist on the desk—once, twice, three times.
And then I sat down and took a fresh sheet and dipped my pen in the ink.
I wrote on one sheet, simple and direct:
I am with child.
I called Ti Me and handed it to her to bring to the telegraph office on the Rue de Commerce. I spelled out the address carefully with my own hand. I made her repeat it back to me.
When she was gone, I looked at the pileup of my mother’s love.
I’ll burn it all this afternoon, I told myself in a flash of resolve. If I burn her words, I will be free of whatever she wants of me.
Instead, I stuffed the papers back in my drawer.
Of all the things she told me about limbs and wombs and bodies, Mama did not tell me what it felt like to feel life within your own.
Within a month of the time in the graveyard, I felt it. The women in Mama’s care had always described it as a flutter, but this felt more like a determined, persistent churning. As if a current was gathering inside me. The first time I felt it was in the parlor, while Ella lectured. She had been so enamored of her own words she did not see my expression, or note when I left the room. By the end of the month, the wave was steady and predictable. I imagined the child there, as faceless as the skin of the ocean, as formless as a wave.
Emmanuel was afraid I would lose it. He was convinced that what we had wished for, for so long, could be snatched from this world. It was as if all those deaths of his childhood—his mother, his brothers—were around him again and he saw winding sheets and sorrow everywhere. He said it was now too dangerous for me to leave the house, even for church, even for the daily walk to the market.
“I can manage,” I said. “I can help you in your work.”
But he was not convinced. “It is too dangerous. You could lose it. I would not want to lose it.”
“I will be as likely to lose it in this house as I am on the streets.”
“This is the one thing I ask of you, Libertie,” he said. “I have not asked that much.”
And I thought, This is a lie. But he truly does not know it. And I thought, He really has been a kind husband to you, Libertie. He could be crueler. And I thought, again, that I was as gormless as the wave inside me if I could not make sense of any of this.
It was easier, in the end, to acquiesce. I did not think I could live in that house with everyone except for Ti Me angry with me.
“I will stay in, for now,” I said.
And he smiled and kissed the top of my head. “It’s lovely when you’re stubborn,” he said.
For the first week of my confinement, I kept my usual schedule. That is, I sat with Ella in the parlor room and the two of us pretended to work, while the other women—American and Haitian—moved in and out of the house, to Bishop Chase’s study for instruction and approval.
“Emmanuel tells me you are with child?” Ella said the first morning.
“Yes.”
“Well, then,” Ella said. “Your work is done.”
I thought we could reach a kind of peace. That, even in her madness, she would retreat in the face of this.
But Ella was cunning. She began to smother me with nostalgia. Now, alongside talk of the justice and blood she and Emmanuel had witnessed so long ago, she told me story after story of their childhood.
“When we were six, we had a pet goat who disliked me but loved Emmanuel.”
“When we were fifteen, Emmanuel learned to swim and tried to teach me, but I was a lady enough to refuse,” she said pointedly.
“When we were twenty, Emmanuel wished me to marry, but I asked him who was worthy, and he said, ‘No one.’ Just like that, my brother said, ‘No one.’ He has always understood me.”
It seemed such a lonely way to be twins, I thought, Emmanuel always faced out to a future he was sure he could dream into existence, and Ella always turned back to a past that had meaning only for her.
For relief, I sometimes sat in the stoop of the inner courtyard, watching the hens walk across the dirt, watching them eat the dust out of boredom. But even that was not free of Ella. “Emmanuel and I had pet chickens. Two of them. They were black with red speckles, and Emmanuel loved his, but he hated mine, and he tried to pluck her feathers while she was still crowing, and …”
My escape was the cooking shed itself. Ella refused to enter it. “When we were ten, Ti Me told us to never enter it,” she said.
“You are not ten anymore,” I said.
But Ella was adamant. The shed, she was not allowed to enter.
It was quiet in there. The only sound was Ti Me’s feet shuffling across the dirt and occasionally the clank of a spoon on a pot. It was hot, but when it got to be too much, I sat in the doorway and looked back at the main house. By the time I’d found the safety of the shed, my stomach and thighs had grown so much that my knees spread apart when I sat down. A rash of spots had appeared on my skin, and my underarms were always slick. I wore the same tan smock every day while Ella went about sewing me a new dress, with the waist dropped, for my final months. And still I had not heard a word from my mother.
“Have you ever been with child, Ti Me?” I said.
She sucked at her teeth, and I realized I had offended her. I felt a pang of embarrassment. I saw, in the corner of the kitchen hut, the straw pallet where Ti Me slept.
I tried again. “It feels as though my body is not my own. It feels like it belongs to whatever’s growing in there.”
Ti Me shifted a pot from one end of her worktable to the other. And then she began to tell me about the last time she had been ridden by lwa yo. It was a few weeks ago, she said, and she was so tired afterward she nearly did not make breakfast the next morning. Yon lwa who had mounted her turns her devotees into unruly children, begging everyone for sweets, curving their backs against the swats to come. Ti Me had stood in the circle and cried like a baby, crawled on her knees and stuffed her fingers into her mouth while the spirit acted through her.
“It isn’t frightening when that happens?”
Ti Me cracked a nut on the worktable. “Why would I be scared?”
“Because you have no control over yourself. You lose yourself. You lost your freedom and died in the spirit of something else.”
“Eh,” Ti Me said. “Everything born dies, no?”
Emmanuel came back to me at night, but it was no longer only to me. It was a mirror of the lessons we had learned on the boat to Haiti, except that now, instead of talking to me of flowers, he manipulated the skin of my stomach, pressing hard.
“Do you remember,” I said, “not so long ago, teaching me to swim?”
“Of course,” he said. He was watching my stomach rise and fall with my breath.
“You could touch me like that, again, if you wished.”
“The time for that is over for now,” he said.
At dinner each night, as Bishop Chase and Ella listened, he questioned what I had done with my days indoors.
“What did you eat?”
“Which cistern did you drink from?”
“How many hours did you rest?”
“Did you walk the length of the hall three times, or ten?”
“I do not think,” I said after the fourth night of this, “that your father and Ella want to hear every detail of my confinement.”
“On that we agree,” Ella said cheerfully. “I do not.”
“Ella, stop.” Emmanuel turned to me. “It is something we should be proud of. And it is their future, too.”
“It is not,” I said in a rush of anger. “It is mine.”
There was a silence while Emmanuel looked down at his plate, chastened.
“You will explain to her?” Bishop Chase was speaking to Emmanuel. Never to me.
“There’s nothing to explain,” I said.
Bishop Chase kept chewing slowly, then swallowed and took a sip from his glass. “Ti Me, a bit more please.”
“Libertie,” Emmanuel said, “I will resolve it later.”
I pushed myself back from the table as best I could and walked to the courtyard stoop, to stare at the night sky.
It was not clear if the face of the moon that looked down on me now was the same one that looked down on my mother. And in tha
t loneliness, I felt a longing for her so violent that it made me rise up from the stoop and begin to pace.
“You know,” I heard. “Emmanuel really does love you.”
I looked up. It was Ella, standing in the light from the doorway.
“I suppose.”
“You know,” Ella said, “when we were sixteen—”
“I do not wish to hear childhood stories right now, Ella.”
“When we were sixteen,” she said, “I saw my father stick his finger in the coo coo of every serving girl up and down this street, including Ti Me. I told Emmanuel what I saw, and he said not to lie, never to lie. I told Papa what I saw, and he struck me and told me if I did not behave, I would have to stay in the house forever.
“Emmanuel said then to me what he said to you. That he would fix it with Papa. And then I knew he loved me. He told me to try very hard to forgive Papa, and he would fix it. And I did.
“Emmanuel told Papa I was sick. He told everyone I was sick. My friends have believed I was sick since we were sixteen. But he told me just to pretend. And it has been a little secret between us. I did not want you to know. You are so young, and I did not think you would understand. But you should. The world thinks you are mad … It’s the greatest freedom I’ve ever known. Emmanuel gave that to me.
“I say whatever I wish to anyone. What colored woman in this world has that? Not a one, not a one anywhere on this Earth. You felt it when you first came, no? I can sew it into a million little words. I am free to speak my mind. Emmanuel did that for me, and he’ll do it for you.
Ella held out her hand. “Because he really loves you.”
Freedom was Ben Daisy choosing the bottom of the water over its surface, and the Graces singing, and Mama leaving me to put myself together in the loam, and the woman with the white chalked face, a pepper falling from her ear, dancing for the dead.
I knew what freedom was, and I knew I did not have it as I lay in bed beside Emmanuel, hissing in the dark, wary of what words would fall over the gaps in the ceiling above us.
Libertie Page 25