Libertie Kaitlyn Greenidge (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

for close examination, and lit its wick in the fire. I placed it in the small glass lantern and came and stood at Mama’s side.

“Steady, there, Libertie,” she said as she lifted my arm herself, so I could get the angle of the light right.

She settled down into the little chair and leaned forward. She took his ear in her hand, as gently as a lover, and stretched the lobe very carefully, so that she could see inside.

“And it’s so damn cold!” Ben Daisy said suddenly, rising up.

Mama sat back.

“So cold all the time. And my mouth, I tell you, it tastes like salt. Ever since yesterday. It just tastes like salt in my mouth. And Hannah, she says my breath stinks like the wharves. What do I care,” he said. “That sister of mine finds every way to tell me I’m wrong. But the foreman said it, too, this morning.”

He sat back down. As he spoke, indeed, a deeply salty smell filled the room. It was not necessarily unpleasant. Just very strong.

“I feel,” he said. “I feel …” He slumped back down. “I feel like I’m falling underwater.”

Mama lifted her chin. “Note that down, Libertie.” She was trying, very hard, to conceal her excitement.

“Well,” she said after a moment, “there is not much I can do for the smell of the breath. But chew these, twice a day.” She handed him a bundle of mint leaves. “And come back again next week—”

“Like hell I will,” Ben Daisy said.

“Just to talk,” Mama said quickly, and Ben Daisy grumbled and then moved toward the door.

Mama watched him go and then turned to me.

“Is he cured?” I asked. I was excited.

“We shall see,” she said. She was not going to play her hand.

All week long, I asked Mama if she thought Ben Daisy would come back to us, and she said, “It’s not for me to decide, Libertie. It’s up to him.” But I could see by Saturday she was as nervous as I was, even though she would not say it.

Sunday morning, we headed to church and walked past the stony-faced Miss Hannah to our pew, as always.

Reverend Harland began the sermon—about Belshazzar’s feast and the disembodied hand that had appeared to him and had begun to write on the wall the thoughts of God. Reverend Harland was talking about rulers dishonoring God and the calamity that would follow, but while he talked, I tried to think of that hand, floating in the air. Were its fingers long or stubby? Its palms jaundiced? What color was its skin—deep black or warm brown or the same pink as Mama’s cheeks? Did that hand also float above a pyramid, or in a distant desert, shimmering in the heat? And did Belshazzar, who saw the wonder, ever think in the moment of astonishment to keep the marvel to himself, to keep a secret, to not reveal it, to revel in the mystery of words untranslatable?

The sermon ended, and so did my speculations. The singing was about to begin. The choir assembled, and then, as they were about to start, we heard a loud, off-tune voice, too straw-like to be called a tenor, rise from the back of the church.

Oh Lord,

                Oh Lord,

Oh Lord,

                I’m saved again.

We all turned to see who it could be, and it was Ben Daisy, his shirt now cleaned and pressed, his hat back on his head, singing as loud as he could while his sister stood beside him, crying tears of joy and sharp embarrassment.

After that, Mama was revered. Everyone could see Ben Daisy was cured. He was the first man down the road at dawn, heading to the fields. He helped out the reverend at church. He stopped drinking altogether. He only went to Culver’s to pay the few cents he could, to settle his debt for all the corn whiskey he’d drunk in the past.

The others came out of Culver’s back room and began to take the cure with Mama, too—Otto Green Leaf and Birdie Delilah, and even Pete Back Back, whose shirt was still wet from his never-closing wounds.

Ben Daisy was truly a new man, anyone could see, and Reverend Harland dedicated a special sermon to it that next week.

“The psalms tell us that the Lord heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds,” Reverend Harland said. “He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit. The psalms tell us to sing to the Lord, as Ben Daisy has done, with grateful praise and make music to our God. For the Lord delights in those who fear him and who put their hope in his unfailing love. And he sends his word to melt the snow; he stirs up the breezes, and the waters flow.”

Afterward, when everyone had surrounded Mama to congratulate her, Ben Daisy pushed through the scrum of people, and hooked his little finger into Mama’s and shook it—a queer offer of thanks, I remember thinking.

“You done it,” he said with a wink. And then he sighed, “I can’t wait to tell Daisy all about this.”

Mama looked taken aback, but then she smiled and said, “I’m happy for you.” She did not ask me to note that exchange in her little book, not yet.

Ben Daisy was cured right before Pinkster. Pinkster was what the old ones celebrated, the ones who had been alive for slave days here in Kings County—so ancient they seemed to me then, as old as the hills all around us. They all spoke in that strange singsong accent of old New York. They had celebrated Pinkster when they were young, and their hips still moved, and it was a queer kind of pleasure we all took, to make sure they could still celebrate it in their old age.

Every Pentecost, we young ones were instructed to make the old ones gingerbread and gather bunches of azaleas. In Sunday school, we worked to make the paper crowns