Libertie

by Kaitlyn Greenidge

  “Your father is a monster. Your sister is lost.”

  “She is not completely lost. She told you herself.”

  “You would have me live that existence?”

  “No. If you would be sensible. If you would trust me. If you would hold on. You would see, we only have to please him for a little while longer to be free.”

  “How much longer?”

  “When the child is born, if it’s a son, he will be more agreeable. My father and I are opposed—you know this. You cannot believe that I am the same as him.”

  “You’ve condemned your sister to … I am not even sure what kind of existence.”

  “She trusts me. As you should trust me.”

  “Why should I trust you if you don’t even understand what is wrong?”

  “You are being impossible, Libertie.” He turned his back to me. The mattress creaked. “Papa … what he is doing is no different than what the slave masters used to do to our foremothers. Where do you think your mother’s pretty color came from? Where do you think mine did?”

  “But that does not make it right.”

  “No. But this is a new world here, with new rules. He is making his. I am making mine. You know what mine will be.”

  “Neither of your rules are new for me, or for your sister, or for Ti Me.” I thought of the banner at Cunningham College, with its list of what made men and what made women. “We have always lived under them, whether there or here.”

  He turned back. I could feel his breath, hot on my face; he had brought himself as close to me as possible. “You are protected and cherished. I cherish you. And because of that, he will respect you,” he said. “You have my love and devotion and my promise to always protect you. And you live in a country where I am considered man enough to make that happen. It would not be so back at your mama’s house. You know that.”

  “You do not understand.”

  “What is there to understand?”

  “You have freedom to define yourself, and I do not have any.”

  “You would not be asking for this if you loved and trusted me,” he said. “It is the same with your mother. She did not trust me to wrap a bandage around a woman’s arm without her oversight. But I thought you were different than her. That you had a better sense of what was possible.”

  I could feel his expectancy. But I did not want to give it to him. To give it to him would have been betrayal.

  I sat up in bed, put my feet on the floor, and began the walk to the cooking shed.

  In the shed, I slept on the worktable. There was a hole in the roof, through which you could see the stars. I fell asleep looking up at them and was awakened only when Ti Me came in and gasped.

  “You scared me, mamselle.”

  “I am sorry,” I said. “But I think I will stay here with you for a while, if you wish.”

  “You have scared Monsieur Emmanuel. He and Ella searched the house for you and now he is walking the street, calling for you. You did not hear?”

  “No.” I rolled over, onto my side.

  “They are trying to find you.”

  “Just let me rest here, please. You will not get in trouble. I will tell them I told you to let me sleep here.”

  “You would be more comfortable upstairs.”

  “Do you know, Ti Me, that when you are with child, your ribs float apart? Just like logs in a river. Float right apart.”

  “You are ill, mamselle.”

  “I only want to lie here for a little bit longer,” I said. “When Monsieur Emmanuel returns, I will go back upstairs.”

  I could not see her expression in the dark, but I heard her turn to go back to the house. I felt the room grow cool around me. I could smell the peppers drying on strings on the wall. The grain of the worktable mixed with the blood of all the chickens cut and quartered. It was almost comforting. It reminded me of Mama.

  “You will not get up?” It was Emmanuel standing over me, speaking in his softest tones.

  “No.”

  “You would sleep better inside.”

  “It is good enough here for Ti Me.”

  “She is not with child.”

  You and your father see to that. “No, she is not.”

  “Come,” he said. I felt him pull at the back of my smock.

  I hunched down further, my knees bunched up against the squash of my lower belly. “I will not move. So do not try.”

  “You are being ridiculous.”

  “I am only asking to be left alone for a little while.”

  He said something low to Ti Me, who sucked in her teeth. Then he was gone, and it was me and her, lying there in the dark, with the chicken feathers floating around us.

  I turned around again to look at her.

  “Is it true, Ti Me?”

  She was quiet for a long time. I could hear her breathing into the straw pallet. Then she sighed.

  “Emmanuel feels like a son to me,” she said. “Sometimes, he feels like a brother.”

  “Bishop Chase did that to you, what Ella said.”

  “It was not like that,” she said. “Miss Ella is young and misunderstands.”

  “I do not think so.”

  Quiet again. Finally, she said, “Bishop does many things to many girls. You know what a man is like. It is no good to wish for something different. It’s not possible.”

  I listened to Ti Me’s breath slow for a long time. I listened to the night all around us. It was a queer thing that the night here in Haiti was not frightening. It was almost like a friend. I thought of lying in the Gradys’ parlor, overwhelmed by loneliness. Of the night around my mother’s house, always threatening to be broken by someone else’s need—the knock on the door, the summons of “Doctor, come quick!”

  That was not part of the night here. Sleeping in the cooking shed meant I could hear the sounds from the street more clearly. The bray of a baby goat lost for a moment from its mother. The rising and falling hum of insect wings fluttering. And far away, the roll of the ocean. I imagined I could hear the creak of a ship there, too. Would I take it, if I could? And if I did, where would it carry me? I had once believed escape was possible.

  Emmanuel had always accused me of not loving the country. But as I listened to the night, I realized I loved it. I loved this land. If there was an answer to any of this, it was in the hills and the water around me. I loved it maybe even more than Emmanuel did. I loved it enough to wish more for it and my life there than what Emmanuel or his father could imagine.

  Here is how you live in the cooking shed.

  You make sure to wake up each morning before Ti Me, to wipe down the table you slept on. You roll off the table very carefully—your belly is heavy by then. Before you decided to live in the shed, your husband joked that perhaps you were carrying twins, and you think, each morning, more and more, that he was maybe right.

  Two women cramp a shed.

  You are aware you are asking a lot of your host. You wonder if you are doing the same thing you despise your husband’s father for, just more politely. Sometimes, you wonder if she wishes it was she with the belly full of babies under the smock. She never looks at your body. She lets her eyes drift over it.

  You find it awkward to sit in silence with her in the shed, so you try to draw her out. You talk to her in her own language, but she laughs at all the words you don’t know. So sometimes you both speak in English, and sometimes you alone speak Kreyòl, and she answers that with a crack of her knuckles.

  It is not a real answer.

  A body cannot answer a question.

  You take to making pronouncements to her. “I will never step back in that house,” you tell her, “as long as the bishop lives there.”

  And, “I don’t think he ever loved me.”

  And, “I think I am the silliest pickaninny who ever lived.”

  And, “How is it possible to become free when you do not even know who you are?”

  These questions make you reckless and queasy. Saying them aloud is like s
ucking on the grayest gristle of fat on a stewing chicken bone. It is like smelling oxtails boiling. You feel how you used to feel when you wrote to the woman in the water, that telling the truth of what you feel is a dangerous thing, that it could invalidate your very self. Then you think of that woman in the water, and how she led this man to you. He called you one of her devotees. This man who fundamentally misunderstood you, and who you fundamentally misunderstood. You thought he was braver than he was. You thought he had a bigger imagination. His imagination was a cooking pot with the lid on, boiling.

  All this takes your breath away, which is already short, because two expanding baby skulls are lovingly pressed on your lungs, making you lose your capacity for air. You are running out of air. You are not sure your husband understands this.

  Gasping, you try to make yourself useful. Cooking is very much like making medicine, you think at first. There is a certain amount of drudgery in mixing and chopping and measuring, though Ti Me measures by handfuls and pinches, which makes more sense than how your mother measured, you thought bitterly. Your mother with her scales and her pipettes, and you, as a child, having to wash them each night for her. You try to do the same here, telling yourself you are useful. Ti Me looks skeptical.

  You offer to gather eggs in the morning for Ti Me, and she says she supposes that you could. Sometimes, the eggs are malformed, the tops folded over onto themselves. You look at the nests, at the brooding hens, and you feel … nothing. You’d imagined that you would feel a great kinship with the world of mothers, now that you will shortly be one. But you do not. The pregnant nanny goat with its red swollen belly still disgusts you, and when you see another woman with child waddle past the back of the courtyard, you only feel embarrassed of how little you yourself have become a mother. Of how much you are still lacking.

  Getting the eggs is tricky, because you are avoiding your husband and his family. You try to either get up before any of them or stay in the shed until your husband and his father, at least, are gone. But at night, when you lay on the worktable, you still lie as if Emmanuel was beside you. You curl to the edge and make space for this boy, as if the two of you were still in bed.

  You lose count of your nights in the shed. Eventually, your husband leads his sister to the door, leads her by the hand like a child, and has her stand and call, “Libertie, Libertie, I have something to tell you.”

  You do not come out of the shed. You sit in the dark and call back, “You can say whatever you wish from there.”

  You hear them scuffle, as if someone is about to leave. Then Ella yelps. Had your husband pinched her? Ti Me, later, will confirm that he had. Just like when they were small. But after the yelp, you hear Ella, in her grudging singsong, say, “I did not mean to frighten you, sister dear. Please forgive us.”

  You do not shout anything back to that. You can feel the two of them out there, waiting. You will not respond. Eventually, one of them shuffles away.

  A few minutes later, your husband comes into your shed and says, “Ti Me, may we have a moment.”

  When she is gone, you say to him, “You’ve forced Ti Me out of her home.”

  “You have,” he says back, and it shocks you a bit, his willingness to do battle. You have always known him as a lover. You have always felt that power over him. You did not expect him to be willing to fight. If you do not know yourself as his lover, as the one who makes his eyes turn soft and makes his voice weak and makes him bow his head to please you:

  What are you?

  What power do you have here?

  You are frightened then that you’ve lost him. That maybe he was lost to you already.

  So you square your shoulders and decide, no matter. If he’s lost, then maybe you are ready to be something else.

  “You are a liar,” you say.

  “I have never lied to you,” he says in a sob, and all your resolve nearly leaves you. And it is maddening that he is right. You want to go to him and hold him, to hold him as you did when you were both at sea. But in the dark shed, you think of the gleam in Ella’s eye, and Ti Me’s quiet voice saying:

  You know what a man is like.

  It is no use to wish for something different.

  It is not possible.

  “Do you remember,” you say, “when you wooed me and told me that we were equals? That we would be companions?”

  “Have we not been?”

  “You did not tell me your family’s history.”

  “I have always thought—” He stops, his voice strangled with tears. “I have always thought that I could be myself with you.”

  “But your self belongs to this rottenness. Your self defends it.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Which self have you been? The one who wants a million sons to build a free nation? The one who lets his father corrupt a country with his lewdness and greed? The one who calls his sister mad until maybe she’s become it? The one who imagines doing all of this means he’s working toward freedom?”

  In the dusk, you see how slight he is, again. How pale his skin is, and how it glows. You think of how much pleasure you took in his looks, how much you took pleasure in the pleasure others took in looking at him. You were Mrs. Doctor, Mrs. Emmanuel Chase, Mrs. Chase. Your genuine desire for him was all mixed up in knowing how much he desired you, and how much anyone—Ella seething in the sitting room, his father peering at you over his glasses, your mother, shocked and scared, the high yellow American women of the colony with their faces fixed in disbelief—how all of them could see it. It was so plain they couldn’t deny it.

  How much it would hurt if all that certainty of who you were, at least to them, was gone.

  “You are unfair, Libertie,” he says. He unbends his head. And for a moment, it is as it was when the two of you were in the mountains, in the pool, his hands holding you up, through the water, to the sky.

  “I do not know what to do,” you say.

  “There is nothing to do,” he says. “You are only upset and broody.”

  “No,” you say. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Come back in the house, Libertie.”

  “I think,” you say carefully, “I will stay out here for a little while longer.”

  He sighs. Bends his head again.

  And then he is gone.

  The best part about living in the shed was being close to the fire. I no longer had to listen to the string of chicken move past Emmanuel’s father’s teeth, or his sister sip each teaspoon of her consommé. The only sound I missed was the fork up against my husband’s tongue.

  I did not eat what the family ate. I ate what Ti Me did. Sometimes, we roasted plantains in the embers of the fire. Sometimes, she cracked two raw eggs in a cup and drank it, and I drank it, too. I did not have the nausea so many women have with pregnancy. Instead, I craved the scraps of Ti Me’s worktable. Sometimes, she had to slap the potato skins from my hands—she would catch me gathering them up and sucking each one as if it was honey.

  “You best not start eating the dirt, mamselle,” she warned me. “You do that, and I’ll have Monsieur Emmanuel himself come and get you.”

  It was true I had been tempted, but I took Ti Me at her word, though I kept a small handful of dust in my smock pocket, to lick at when she was asleep.

  “Ti Me, do you love the younger Chases?”

  “Non, mamselle.”

  “No!” I laughed, surprised by how she’d said it without hesitation.

  Her expression did not change. “They are kind. They were good to me when I came to them as a girl.”

  “But you don’t love them?”

  “What does any of that have to do with love?”

  “You never loved Emmanuel and Ella, then?”

  She snorted. “I never love Monsieur Emmanuel. Or Mamselle Ella. I care for them like they are my brother and sister. I care for them better than a mother. But I don’t love them. When I first saw them, they were so thin. And so pale. They got spots in the sun. Th
ey were so scared—scared of everything. Emmanuel told me they see their mama pass, right in front of them. Their brothers, too. Their papa, he would always pray. The children cry, and he would tell them to pray. They would cry on me at night. I have my mother—she still living, so I did not know what to do. She told me just to hold them. So I did.”

  “You were not tired of them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When someone needs you that much, it doesn’t make you tired?”

  “You are speaking nonsense.”

  “I used to think that as a little girl. And I thought that was what was wonderful about Emmanuel. He wanted me without asking anything of me. I thought that at least. But now I think he asks too much.”

  “He asks nothing of you.”

  “He asks me to live with a bad man and a girl who pretends to be mad and does nothing all day.”

  “But the bishop and Ella can’t help who they are.”

  “Do you think they will ever change?”

  “The bishop. What would you change? He wishes for a place he cannot return to. He does what any other man would do if they were him. It is no use trying to change him.”

  “That’s what you always say, Ti Me. Nothing is ever of any use.”

  “It would be cruel to try and change the bishop. You can only live beside him and turn away from him when you can. And Ella, she is still a child.”

  “I am to stay here and take whatever the bishop says or tries to do to me?” I said.

  “You want to know why you are so restless, causing all this family trouble?”

  “It is Monsieur Emmanuel who’s caused the trouble.”

  “Bah,” she said. “Men do what they do. They are like a plow, moving through dirt—they just make the way. It’s women like you and your fretting that cause a mess, disturb a rut.”

  “What’s wrong with me, then? Why am I so restless, if I should already know to do nothing like you?”

  Ti Me had begun chopping up the cassava for dinner. She did not stop as she said to me, “You’ve been claimed by the spirit. By Erzulie. And you will be unsatisfied and miserable till you devote yourself to her.”