Libertie

by Kaitlyn Greenidge

  “Have you told this to Monsieur Emmanuel?”

  “I told him the first night I saw you. I said, ‘Monsieur, a woman like that doesn’t know herself. You should never marry a woman so lost she does not recognize herself. Can’t even place her own reflection in a mirror. Can’t even see her own face on top of still water.’ He said you were a clever girl, you would make do. But … here you are.” She looked up from her work to where I lay, belly-up to the soot-stained ceiling of the cookhouse.

  “If you wanted to,” Ti Me said while looking at the large bowl of rice, “you could change it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shifted the rice—once, twice. The husking sound seemed to mock me.

  “It is Monsieur Emmanuel who believes in all that,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “Wi, mamselle,” Ti Me said.

  “Well,” I said after a moment. “What would I do? If I believed the things you did.”

  Ti Me finally looked me full in the face. “You would have to kouche.”

  I felt my cheeks grow hot, and I looked down, embarrassed. I could hear the word in Emmanuel’s voice, when he’d whispered it to me in the dark, describing how we lay and died and were born together.

  Ti Me laughed at my expression. “No, not like that. It means that, too, but also it means other things. You will kouche …” Here, she gestured to my stomach under the smock. “Give birth. But what I mean is that when you kouche, you would dedicate yourself to yon lwa. You would go to the initiation and you would kouche—it would be like you are dying. We would cry for you and grieve for you, because we would know you are passing over to another side. We would kiss you goodbye, Emmanuel and I.”

  I shivered.

  “You would cover your eyes, and you would be made to dance in circles. Over and over. When that was done, you would be led to a small dark room, and that is where you kouche again. You would stay there. You would be reborn. You would be as a baby in a womb. You would be brought food and rubbed down, as a new baby is. You would be raised back up to become a woman again. But you would be new. When you leave the room, when you are finished, you would keep your head covered for forty days. Because you would still be like a newborn baby, and your head is soft, and the spirits within your head, even though they have finally been fed, would still be growing strong each day.

  “But”—Ti Me sighed—“even though you should kouche and it would solve a lot of your restlessness, it does not matter. You will not stay here long enough to right it.”

  I began to sweat. “I don’t understand.”

  “You sent me to the telegraph office. You make me send a message. You will not stay here.”

  “I did not ever ask to leave.”

  “You can leave a place in more ways than one.”

  The mail boat came only on Tuesdays. The telegraph office was only open in the afternoon. Because of this, everyone knew everyone else’s communications. There were the back-and-forths of the American Negro colony and the comings and goings of the white French and American merchants who stayed in the city. And then there was the continuous flow of gossip from the countryside to the market street, which wound over the mountains from Port-au-Prince. It was hard to escape this web of foreknowledge. It had already told the town that I was with child, that I had spurned my husband, that I slept among vegetable peelings.

  An uppity woman, to turn a good man into a beggar in his own home.

  A woman too sure of herself.

  A woman that dark can’t play like that.

  Dr. Chase will be ruined.

  Bishop Chase will, too.

  I wished for any other sound to drown it out. Sometimes, I drummed my fingers on the shed’s table, just to break the rhythms around me. If only, my index finger tapped. If only. It did not seem fair that my deficiencies in womanhood, in wifeliness, in Negro life, should follow me all the way to this new world, where I was supposed to be washed clean, left out of those old songs, harbinger of a different one altogether.

  So it felt like a kind of dream when all this changed and began to din around the fact that we would soon all be visited by a troupe of Negro performers. They were making a tour of the Caribbean, had come from Florida to Cuba and then to us, in Jacmel. This news was received with great excitement—even Bishop Chase seemed pleased.

  The only time I saw Ti Me genuinely smile in that house was when she came to the shed and told me that Bishop Chase had given a special dispensation to everyone in the colony, allowing them to attend the performance, even though theatrics were generally considered sinful.

  She shyly pulled, from under her own cot, her better shawl, all white, the one she only wore at holiday time and kept folded over, with care, in an old burlap rice sack. As I touched the gleaming white linen, I realized my dilemma. I wanted to hear something besides the sound of our alley, the sound of our animals, and Ti Me’s occasional voice. I was bored in the shed by then. It was comfortable as I grew bigger and my hips grew soft, but it had lost its charm.

  To leave it, though, would mean some sort of a concession. I was not sure exactly to whom. Was it to Emmanuel, or was it to myself? Lazy Libertie, without even the conviction to withstand the offer of a traveling show. Mama had stood firm for less. I felt embarrassed that I had ever criticized her as a girl. A song, it turned out, was where my resolve ended.

  “They say they are bringing a man who plays a horn,” Ti Me said, her voice swooping up in glee. “And another man who has trained the birds to talk to him, and can talk back to them. He can tell us their stories.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “And there will be a carnival, and people will dance.”

  “Yes,” I said. I reached for the bowl of rice Ti Me was now washing.

  “And they are coming all the way from where you did.”

  Every evening, when Ti Me left our shed to serve dinner, I sat on the floor near the door and looked out across the yard, at the main house. Sometimes, when she returned from her duties, Emmanuel followed her. I would sit by the door, and he would tell me, again, how much I loved him, how he loved the children inside me, how I needed to only step out of the door and into the world he was building for us.

  My resolve broke a bit more each time he came—because I was furious with him, with his father, but I still loved him. I still wished for him by my side, to run my hand over his pale back in the moonlight, to feel his hands underneath me, holding me up in the water. With Mama, I had held on to the anger and let the love burn away. But with Emmanuel, there was no satisfaction in this burnt space between us. It only made me lonelier, and the loneliness made me long for him more. I would be weak, I knew it, and return to him. But not yet, I hoped.

  The night that word came about our visitors, I stayed for a bit longer while Emmanuel whispered all his love for me.

  “I would like to see the players,” I said finally.

  “I do not think that is a good idea, in your condition.”

  “I am not so far along that I can’t go.”

  “You are too far gone. There will surely be a crowd, and if anything were to happen to you, we would not be able to get you help in the crush of people.”

  “Maybe I could go but stand apart.”

  “You would probably,” he said slyly, “be able to hear them from our bedroom window.”

  So that is how I found myself sitting again in my husband’s room, a chair drawn up to the sill and the shutters open, straining to hear what I could past the crowd.

  Ella and Bishop Chase had left to listen. Ti Me had gone, as well. It was only me and Emmanuel in the house. I sat to one side of the window; he stood to the other.

  “I do not think I will be able to hear—”

  “You will. They are performing on the Rue de Commerce. We can usually hear what happens there.”

  Outside the window, the sun was bending deeper into the sky, and we could see, just over the roofs of the trading offices, the water of the harbor moving back and forth.<
br />
  I am here, far away from my mother and my father’s bones, I thought, and I am looking at a sight they will never see.

  “Do they move?” Emmanuel said.

  “What?”

  “Do they move, the babies? Do they move a lot? Is it painful?”

  “They are sleeping at the moment,” I said.

  He smiled at that, his face so eager. I took a breath. Stopped. Took a breath again.

  “They move the most when Ti Me speaks.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. You know, she does not speak often, but when she begins to talk about something, it is almost as if they swim towards her.”

  “Then they know her as the rest of us know her.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Do not say that.”

  He blushed. “I did not mean it that way.”

  “Your father took advantage of a girl who acted as mother to you. Who was only a few years older than you.”

  “Everything is not as simple as you think it is, Libertie.”

  “But it seems very simple. You say you want a different world than your father’s. This is a chance to start making it.”

  He looked out the window.

  “If everything you do is for the good of our people,” I said, “for the country yet to come, I wonder if what he did to Ti Me, if that was part of making a nation, too.”

  “You are grotesque,” he said.

  “I am only asking questions. I want to know.”

  “You cannot know everything,” he said. Then, “Aren’t you tired of fighting, Libertie?”

  I felt a heaviness in my bones that took my breath away. I felt the hang of my belly, pulling on my back, and the crook of my spine from sleeping on a wooden table. I felt the swell of my feet, the itch at the back of my knees that I could not reach. The waves, just over the horizon, moved over and over again, and even that sight exhausted me.

  “You must be tired,” he said again. “I know that I am. You ask me to do something that I have tried to do since I was a boy, and I tell you I will do it. When the time is right. But we have to plan, to build new things. And while we build, it would not be so bad to lie down here, in our marriage bed, which belongs half to you, after all.”

  He was at my elbow then, pulling it gently, and I settled into the cup of his hand. I was ready to follow him—I would have followed him, and we would have lain down, curved into each other like two rib bones in the same breathing chest. But then I heard it.

  I had almost forgotten that their voices were real. I had not heard them in close to eleven months. Sometimes, in those first few nights on the ship, I had imagined that they sang to me. If I was being truthful, when I woke up in the mornings since, I was always a bit disappointed that I had not dreamt of them the night before.

  Emmanuel still had his hand on my elbow, but it did not matter. I turned toward the window, and it was all I could do to keep myself from leaning out of it, from wanting to jump down to the ground below.

  It was my Graces, come back to me.

  I could not hear what words they were singing from so far away. But I could hear the clarity of their voices, the way they met and married in the air. I could hear how they wound their way to me. I could hear, too, how the crowd had quieted when they began.

  “It’s Experience and Louisa singing,” I said.

  Emmanuel looked exasperated. “It can’t be.”

  But it was—I knew it was—and I listened as closely as I could until they were done, and then I heard my heart beat faster.

  “You must find them. They must know I am here, but you must find them and bring them to the house.”

  “How will I even get close? How will I get down to them?”

  “Please go!” I said.

  “I will go, if it makes you happy.”

  And he was gone, and I thought of this man who would go out into the streets to find them for me. I thought of Ella, saying sourly, an accusation, He really loves you.

  I sat in silence, in the darkening house, until I heard the great door downstairs open and close, and Bishop Chase and Ella purring their kindest regards, and Emmanuel laughing, and then the two voices I missed most in the world, after the voice of my mother.

  Louisa and Experience looked better than they had when we’d left them. Experience was a little stouter—her chin had swelled slightly, a little dimple of fat sat in the middle of it. Louisa was standing straighter. They were both in new dresses, finer fabric than I had ever seen them wear.

  When they saw me, they began to shout—“Ho!” and “My!”—even Experience.

  Finally, Louisa said.

  “You have seen her?”

  “She came to our final performance,” Experience said, “before we began our engagement with the troupe.”

  “It was too hard,” Louisa said, “to manage things on our own. We were nearly run out of town in Connecticut and robbed in Syracuse. We would have given up altogether and returned to school if we had not met Mr. Ashland and the Colored Troubadours. And then they announced their tour of the Caribbean, and that they would even come to Haiti, and we knew we had to join, if only for the chance to see you again.”

  “Thank God Mr. Ashland is honest,” I said.

  Louisa laughed. “Yes, he is a good man. We travel for six more months, and then we return to America and find another way, we suppose.”

  “But you must stay here,” I said.

  Emmanuel moved forward. “Yes, please stay.”

  Louisa looked quickly to Experience. “Let us send Mr. Ashland word of our plans. We were to stay two nights here and then travel on to Port-au-Prince. Mr. Ashland tells us there is an opera house there, finer than anything you can find in New Orleans, almost as fine as Paris.”

  “There was,” Bishop Chase said. “But it burnt down.”

  “Mr. Ashland is not altogether honest,” I said, and was rewarded with another of Louisa’s laughs. I realized I had not made anyone laugh, besides Emmanuel, since I’d been here. Not kindly, anyways. Sitting at the dinner table for the first time in months, my back felt heavy against the chair.

  Louisa and Experience told us all the things they had seen on their travels. It was strange to see them in front of the Chases. They did not understand the Graces’ irreverence but knew enough that these women were good, because they sang the word of God. Still, the bishop mostly looked back and forth between Experience and Louisa, as if they were saying words in a language he did not understand but he knew to be indecent.

  “In Florida, there is a city that is governed entirely by black men and Indians,” Experience said, “and they have built an amphitheater so fine a whisper sounds like a shout.”

  “In Cuba, they had us sing in the market square while a man slaughtered a bull behind us,” Louisa said. “We thought it would be a distraction, but no one clapped until we were done.”

  “They even ignored the bull’s very pretty bow when he was brought down by the mace,” Experience added.

  “They say we will sing for the colored people in New Orleans,” Louisa said, “though Mr. Ashland claims he had to take special care that we weren’t engaged at a fancy house.”

  Ella put down her napkin at this and looked pleadingly at her father. But he shook his head slightly, as if to say Let it pass, for our guests.

  “And,” Experience said, “every penny we earn, except for incidentals, is sent back to the college, Libertie.”

  “We write to Alma Curtis every three weeks to assure her we are staying virtuous.” Louisa winked at me, and I felt my cheeks grow hot.

  “She’ll be proud to know how you’ve turned out,” Experience said.

  “How I’ve turned out?”

  “Yes, she would be proud.”

  “But I’ve done nothing I’ve been educated for,” I said.

  They both look pained.

  Emmanuel looked at me sharply. “You have done very well for yourself, Libertie.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But Alma Curtis used to say I was
a girl who could have an ambition.”

  There was a brief, awkward silence. And then Louisa looked across the table to Ella, to compliment her on her cloak.

  “It’s a coat of righteousness,” Ella said cheerfully. “As righteous as good brother Joseph’s was.”

  Louisa looked at me quizzically. I shrugged.

  Ella continued. “This coat is stitched with the word of the Lord.”

  “Is that so?” Experience said.

  Emmanuel cut her off. “Ella is excellent at needlework. She really is.”

  “Very refined,” Louisa said.

  Ella narrowed her eyes at her brother.

  Emmanuel smiled at the Graces. “We have not had many visitors from outside the island. Probably only once a year, and then mostly other missionaries. It is an honor to have artists in the house.”

  “I am an artist,” Ella said.

  “Enough, Ella.” Bishop Chase put down his fork. “Ti Me,” he called. “Ti Me!”

  She appeared at the dining room door.

  “Take Miss Ella to the parlor, please, to wait for us while we finish dinner.”

  “But I am not done!” Ella said. “I am not finished.”

  Bishop Chase would not look at her; he only continued to chew.

  Ella rocked slightly back and forth in her chair. “You cannot make me leave,” she said. But when she saw Ti Me in the doorway, Ella stood up.

  “I believe I am to retire,” she said. And she bowed her head—once, twice—in each Grace’s direction. Then she was gone.

  I felt Emmanuel’s hand on mine. I had been running my fingernails down the tablecloth, in one long swipe, like the claw of an alley cat. He wrapped his hand around my wrist and squeezed it. I knew he meant it kindly, but I only wanted to pull away.

  I had thought, up until that moment, with the Graces speaking warmly and Emmanuel joining them in their jokes and conversation, that maybe I could do what my husband was pleading with me to do. But then I thought of a thousand more nights in this beautiful country. Would he order me from the table, as his father did, if I said something he did not like? And would I leave with dignity, like Ella did, leave in a fiction, or would I kick and scream as I wished she would do, as I wanted to do now, and be called mad and unruly.