It was quiet for a moment. Emmanuel turned to Louisa and Experience apologetically. “Ella has not had the opportunities you have,” he said. “She has never been to school. She is a bit unused to polished company, but I hope you will not hold that against her.”
“I would never hold it against her,” Louisa said, and Emmanuel smiled as Bishop Chase raised his head in the air. He’d heard the music in her voice, but he could not quite place it.
I had the satisfaction, at least, of seeing his expression when the world did not make sense for him. If only for a moment.
The Graces were to sleep in the parlor, on the broken-down divan that we pushed to the parlor chairs. I stood in the doorway and watched as Ti Me prepared their bed.
Experience cocked her head in Ti Me’s direction as she knelt over the chairs. “This is life in Haiti, then?” she said to me. “All you do is sit up here and make sure Emmanuel is happy when he returns home?”
“You do not have to take in laundry or mending to stay afloat?” Louisa added.
“You are what those girls at school always wanted to be: a lady of leisure.”
I laughed. “Leisure is stifling.”
“Listen to the cheek of this girl,” Louisa said, leaning over to Experience, “telling you and me, you and me, dear Louisa, that leisure is stifling.”
“I would give anything to be stifled,” Experience said dryly, and this set all three of us to laughing again, so loudly that Ti Me looked up, annoyed.
“Lordy,” Louisa said, when we’d made a configuration of furniture that finally seemed as though it would fit the two of them. “I would never have guessed that you live such as this. Experience and I, each night, would say ‘Where do you think she is now? Do you imagine she sleeps in a hammock beneath banana leaves?’ And now to find you living in something like Cunningham’s dining hall, but just with warmer weather …”
I frowned. “That is unkind, Louisa.”
“Is it?” She looked up. “I did not mean it to be. I only mean, your life seems different from what you told us it would be.”
“Isn’t that true for all of us?” I said. “Could you have imagined traveling the world with Experience, sleeping in stagecoaches, arguing with impresarios as naturally as if you were debating the merits of philosophy back at Cunningham?”
“No,” Experience said. “This is true. We could not have imagined that.”
“So then life is different for all of us.”
“Is that why you have not written back to your mother,” Louisa said, “only sent her one telegram telling her you are with child and scaring the poor old girl half to death?”
I started. “How do you know anything of that?”
“Our last performance, before we left the North, in Manhattan, she had heard we would perform, and she came. She showed us the telegram herself. She said, ‘Will you write to her? Will you find out what she means? Will you send her my word?’ And I said, ‘I will do you one better, madame. We will be traveling to Haiti ourselves and can deliver any message that you wish.’ And so she gave us this.”
And here, Louisa reached into her pocket and handed me a folded-over piece of paper, much wrinkled where it had been pressed up against her hip.
“It is from her?”
“She said to place it in your hands if you were alive, and onto your grave if you were dead.”
“She thought I was dead?”
“She said you have not written her a word since your marriage. I think she is justified in thinking you had passed.”
The paper was the same yellowish shade as the pages in her accounting book. I could not bring myself to open it.
“Libertie, it is very cruel of you to send a telegram like that to your mother and never write a letter,” Louisa said.
“I did not know what to say.” My voice came out low. “How would you explain this house to her, if you had to explain it?”
“I guess that is fair,” Experience said.
“Are you safe here, Libertie?” This was Louisa. “Are you well?”
I did not know how to answer her questions. I took the letter and bowed my head and said, “Good night. I will see you in the morning.”
I had promised Emmanuel, for the sake of our guests, I would not sleep in the shed that night. As I climbed the stairs to our bedroom, I felt the letter wrinkle in my hands. I did not want the ink to smear.
When I opened the door, he was there already, of course, in bed. He looked up, expectantly.
“Are they comfortable?”
“I think so.”
“Will you be comfortable?”
“I do not know.”
“At least lie down.”
I set the letter carefully on his desk. I pulled my smock over my head and dropped it on the floor, so that I stood naked in front of Emmanuel.
He sat up in bed. “Come closer,” he said. “I mean, if you please.”
I kept my eyes on him as I approached. When I reached him, he held out one hand, placed it on my stomach, put the other around my waist, and let it rest at the small of my back. He rested his head on my stomach, and I felt the whisk of his eyelashes as he closed his eyes. I looked away from him, to the letter on the table. I both wanted to stand here, with his head on my stomach, with his arms holding the world, and I wanted to crouch on the floor and read every word my mother wrote me. I did not know which way to move and could not break away. So we stayed like that, for a long time, listening to the house settle around us.
Finally, he sighed. “I have missed you,” he said.
“Let us sleep,” I said.
A little past midnight, I heard his breath grow heavy and knew he was fully asleep. I pushed myself out of bed, carefully pulled the chair from his desk, and sat, naked, on the planks of wood, reading my mother’s hand.
My Dearest Libertie,
You do not write, and that may be because you are no longer on this Earth or it may be because you are still angry at me, but either way I miss you and wish to know where you are, so I write this letter to you and send it by way of your friends, the Graces, hoping that it finds you at peace, whether you are on this Earth or below it.
The house feels truly dead now. I do not like staying here most nights. Most nights, I sleep in the waiting room of the hospital.
I write to you from the dark of the waiting room. It is about ten o’clock at night. I’ve just heard the church bell ring. I was to attend a lecture tonight, but I did not feel spirited enough. Besides, the topic is one I think I already know well: “The Future of the Colored Woman.” It is an argument I am too old and tired to add anything to, I think.
The speaker is a very smart young woman, like your friends. She travels from city to city to talk to groups about the colored woman—a marvelous business, one that could not have existed even ten years ago. I told her this, and she seemed unimpressed by her own strangeness. She smiled and said, “Yes, mum.” And I suppose that counts as progress, when a girl like her does things I could not imagine and does not stop once to think of them.
I had hoped I had made you brave like that, Libertie. Perhaps there is bravery in being a wife. Certainly, there is bravery in being a mother. I think you will learn that soon enough, if my calculations are correct.
I have delivered more babies in the last six months than I ever did when you were here with me during the war. I do not know if it is a sign of hope or a sign of desperation, that our people have gone baby mad. I think there are now more colored people in Kings County than ever before. Sometimes on the street, I do not recognize a single face, and I think how this is both a good thing and very lonely-making.
The last woman I attended, it was not here in the hospital. She was a very poor woman. Her husband came and begged me to come to her. He said she had been in labor for many days and he worried that she might not make it. I was tired. I had thought I would go back to the house, for once, that evening, and try to sleep there. But the man came just as I was about to leave, so I followed
him to his home.
They lived in Vinegar Hill, in a small wooden building beside a grog shop. The sounds of her laboring almost drowned out the sounds of the sailors singing shanties next door. She was a very small woman, but loud. I said to her husband, “It is good that she makes so much noise. It means she has fight left in her.”
She was doubled over, walking up and down the room, and so I walked beside her, holding her hand. She had been laboring so long her hand was wet with sweat and kept slipping from mine. I told her, over and over again, what a strong woman she was. What a wonder she was accomplishing. It was her first labor, and these were the things she needed to hear.
Towards the end of it, she screamed once more, very loudly. Then she lifted up her skirt, and what did I see, but the baby’s knee sticking out, foot dangling down, almost doing a little jig.
And the sight of it made me laugh, Libertie, the first time I had laughed since you had gone. I know it was a dire sight. A breeched birth is dangerous, and the woman could have died. But I heard the sailors singing that their love lived in the ocean, and I saw that baby’s knee jerk in time, and I saw the woman’s face, her blink of surprise, and I could only laugh. At the absurdity of the world. The ridiculousness of your absence. The foolishness of whatever I did to cause you to leave me.
You will be glad to know, the woman delivered safely. I had her husband hold her elbows, and I squatted down between her knees, and together we turned the baby until he was straight, and he was delivered, just two hours ago today, by the grace of God our Creator.
I was still laughing when I handed the boy to his mother. She and her husband must have thought me a madwoman, and I am sure they will speak to Rev. Harland about how dotty Dr. Sampson has become in her old age. But even now, as I write you, even though I know the gravest danger we were in, I cannot help laughing. And isn’t that a marvel, Libertie? Is that what you would maybe call grace?
I am not sure what your answer would be. I wish I could see your face just once more, to know what your answer would be. You sent me a message that you were with child, and then nothing. I thought of closing up the hospital and traveling to Haiti myself to find you. But I prayed upon it and felt, to the bottom of my soul, that you will come to me if you are meant to. That I will hear your voice again, whether here on Earth or in heaven.
To my love, my daughter, Libertie
I love you.
Your
Dear
Mama
The Graces left as suddenly as they came, to travel over the mountain to Port-au-Prince, in search of that burnt theater. Louisa took with her, rolled up and tied to the string of her bonnet, my letter for my mother, for whenever she saw her again.
After they left, I did not have the strength to move back down to the shed. And so it was in Emmanuel’s bed, after all, where I gave birth to our children.
My labor began at dawn. I was woken from a dream of the grass on my father’s grave by a sudden pain in my hips, running, like scales on a piano, up my spine.
I could smell the salt of my body all around me.
The whole day, I walked the house, while Emmanuel trotted behind me to keep up and Ella called out nonsensical advice and Bishop Chase looked, for the first time since I’d known him, genuinely nervous. By evening, I began to feel tired from the pain, and I shouted at the three of them, “Only Ti Me has any sense.”
Ella was easily enough gotten rid of. She did not like the sound of pain, and she went back to her room, loudly announcing she was of better use praying for me.
But Bishop Chase did not want to leave, and he watched me, with detached interest, as I winced and Emmanuel stroked my face.
“Please,” I whispered to Emmanuel. Even in pain, I did not have the courage to yell at the bishop. “Please ask your father to leave.”
And he did. He went to his father and said, “Papa, go to your study.”
But Bishop Chase would not. He stood in the doorway and watched me labor, and it was only when I started to undo the ties of my smock—I was so overwhelmed with the heat, with the pain, and just wanted to be free—that he turned and left the room.
I walked in pain, and Emmanuel was there each step with me. And I knew there was no other face on Earth I wished to see, at that moment, except for his.
I thought, I have forgiven you.
I watched him as he watched me, as his soft mouth moved, as he held my arm, as we paced the hall together. I thought of his father, whom he still did not have the power to even make leave a room.
I could hear, in the bedroom next to ours, Ella and her father praying. A whisper—they would never pray loud like the Haitians did, like the Graces dared to do. And that made me even angrier—that even now, they would scrape and keep an etiquette of God. Their hushed prayers came over the gap in the ceiling, and it nearly drove me mad. Emmanuel felt the muscles in my arm stiffen and rubbed me gently there.
“It is all right.” He smiled, and I felt my love for him come back.
I have forgiven you, I thought, but I do not think that will be enough.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “Why do you make a face like that?”
“It only hurts,” I said.
At midnight, I sat up in our bed. Emmanuel lay beside me, his breath light.
The pain that was in my body was warm now. It was a pain I had seen when I attended births with Mama. The births back home in Kings County, when I was a girl—every one was a kind of celebration. Because we knew each new child meant we had a claim to the land, to our space of freedom there.
The very first birth I had seen with Mama had frightened me. I had wanted to run from the room while the woman bellowed and hissed, and the air became thick with the smell of something deep and hidden, something that smelled almost lost.
But Mama had given me a look, and I had not dared to leave her side, and on our walk home she had told me, evenly, “You will not understand until you yourself do it, but in birth is the freest you can be. You do not have to take your leave of anyone or do anything for anyone. You are even free of deciding for your body how it will go—it is deciding for you. Your only expectation is to follow, and that is a kind of freedom, if you let it be.”
Now in bed, I felt the next wave of pain and wished that she were here.
The sheet beneath me became wet. Emmanuel was woken up by the damp. He cried out in joy, in excitement. And then he was up, calling for Ti Me and for boiling water and for strips of cloth and for oil.
I wanted to leave the bed again. I wanted to feel the floorboards creak beneath my feet. A line of sweat trickled from under my chin to my chest between my breasts, to the top of my stomach.
I was breathing as hard as if I was racing up the walls of the room. With Mama, sometimes, a woman insisted on laboring with a knife in the bed beside them, to cut the pain. I had thought it silly then, as silly as Mama declaring those moments an emancipation. I had never thought, fully, what it would mean for me to join them there.
“I want Mama.”
“Yes,” Emmanuel said. “Yes.”
By then, Ti Me was there, holding my other elbow. I could feel inside me a great, deep churning. A new world was trying to break out of my body.
It felt as if my hip bones would grind apart. I looked over both their heads to the ceiling and cried up to it. I felt Emmanuel wipe my sweat and tears. My knees began to shake. My spine bore down around itself—I could name every bone as I felt each one break.
I pushed my feet on Emmanuel’s shoulders, a gross inversion of all the times I used to do the same, in pleasure, at night on the boat. And then I heard nothing. Not Emmanuel crying, not Ti Me whispering, not Ella and Bishop Chase’s prayers winding over the ceiling walls.
I heard only the blood rushing in my ears, as pure and steady as a river, and in that one last searing burn of pain, I heard my mother’s voice, wordless, only the tone and timbre that she’d make over our family’s graves.
I felt the heat of my blood between my legs, and wh
en I looked down again, I saw Emmanuel covered in my blood and crying, and Ti Me covered in my blood and smiling, and lying on each of my thighs, my son and my daughter, our children, my children, born into this world I would make for them.
My Dearest Mama,
You have received this letter delivered to you by Louisa and Experience. Know that, as of this writing, I am alive. By the time Louisa and Experience hand this letter to you, I will have delivered your grandchildren.
I do not know what I am or what I will have become by then. I am not sure I ever knew myself. I used to think this was a failing. Something to hide from you. How could I be a righteous woman, to serve the world as you did, if I did not know myself?
But that seems like so little of a concern, now. I may not know myself, but I know the loneliness of love. I know what toll forgiveness takes. I know that the world is too big to be knowable.
I have learned to swim. Emmanuel taught me at first. But I learned how to float myself. The water carries you up, even when you think you are too heavy. When I float like that, I think of you and your ledgers, I think of where you go when you order the world in your mind, and I think I am ever closer to joining you there. I wish you could see your Libertie, floating in cool water so blue it seems God would drink it, staring up at the sky. When you are worried for me, when you are scared for me, when you wish to know me, think of me like that.
Mama, I am coming to you. I will be there maybe even before this letter arrives. When I deliver these children, I will rest for as long as I can and then I will come to you. The Graces have already agreed to help. They have left me their cut of the last leg of this tour, they have left it with a ship captain in Jacmel’s port, and when I am ready, I am to find out when he next sails to New York, and he will harbor me and my children.
I will miss this country. I think it is here, more than anywhere else, that is my home. But I cannot stay. What a horrible thing in this world, to know your home and also know you can never live in it. I will tell you what Emmanuel has done, or rather, what he chooses to continue to have done, when I am home with you again. Emmanuel is a man who I do not think is all bad, but he does not have a big enough imagination to imagine me free beside him. I have already forgiven him for it, though.
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