Libertie Kaitlyn Greenidge (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

Even past Judgment Day

That was the song, I am ashamed to say, that I made up after hearing this story, and the other children sang it, too. It became the anthem of our schoolyard for a year, and children still sing it today, I am told. I sang it because of all that I did not know and could not know about what happened. But even at that age, I knew curiosity could be heartless and I made sure not to sing it around Miss Hannah or my mother.

My heart hurt, and I was full of disgust, though for who or for what I did not know. I only knew I did not ever want to care for another if it made me act like Mr. Ben. If it made me wander the fields of Brooklyn, pressing flowers for someone who would never come. If it made me speak another’s name until it became my own, even when I was guaranteed no answer. If it made me try to heal my people and fail so disastrously. If it made me put my brother in a coffin to get him free and still have him die anyways.

Care, I decided, was monstrous.

It was as clear as Ben Daisy’s hat, floating on the waters. I would not be a doctor, no matter what Mama wished. I could not deceive others, and I could not deceive myself, as she did.

Sa ki bon avèk yon kè, sè ke li pa pote jijman

What’s good about the heart is that it does not reason

Was freedom worth it if you still ached like that? If you were still bound on this Earth by desire?

It was a blasphemous thing to think, and I could not speak it to anyone, except to the plants in Mama’s garden. I whispered it into the open blossoms’ faces in the mornings, and then I carefully ran my thumb over each velvety petal. I knew my words were poison, and I was certain they could kill whatever good lived there.

Who was the woman Ben Daisy loved enough to die for? I looked for her where we’d all last seen her—in the water. I looked at the bottom of our well, in the muddy pools that collected in the ditches by the path to downtown. I looked for her in the pond, just past our settlement, where we took our laundry to wash. I looked for her in the wetlands, where the turtles and frogs and dragonflies swept through, where the men sometimes fished on Saturday afternoons. I stood, the tongues of my leather boots stiffening with mud, my feet sinking into the ground, and breathed in that murky smell of lake beds, and knew, in an instant, she wasn’t there. Despite what Ben Daisy had said about her love of cakes and sugar, I did not think a woman who could drown a man in her arms lived in anything as sweet as fresh water. Her domain was brackish. She would live in salt.

The few times we went close to the waterfront, when Mama had to travel downtown and take the cart, I would lift my head to try and catch the smell of it over all the other scents—the rotted fruit in the gutters, the sweet blossoms of the trees planted in front of the nicer houses, the warm breath of horse manure, the sweat of all the bodies teeming around us. At the very top, maybe, when the wind was right, I could smell that other woman’s home. Mostly, though, I listened.

If you listen closely, water, when it laps against the sides of a bucket, when it mouths a riverbed, sounds like hands clapping. It sounds like a congregation when prayers are done. But what is its message? It is not deliverance, I don’t think. It is not salvation. It is something just underneath that, something that even Mama couldn’t reach with her mind. So what hope was there for me of finding it?

A few times, riding beside her in our cart or walking beside her through our town, the rhymes I’d started myself about women and water ringing in our ears, I asked Mama, “Is the woman in the water real?” but she would only say, “I’ve taught you too well to fall for nonsense.” It was a flash of her old assurance, which had gone somewhere underground, inside her, after Ben Daisy was gone.

After he left us, whenever new people came to us, whether by Madame Elizabeth’s coffins or, when that route became too dangerous, by secret means of their own, Mama looked at them with sadness. She did not try to feed them ground seahorses. Instead, when they came, when she encountered them at church, she touched their shoulders and told them to come speak to her about what ailed them.

She still saw patients. She still gave aid. But she no longer imagined new cures, and when the people came with something strange, she looked at the remedies already written and did not offer her own.

People distrusted her. They did not always stop at our pew, first, after services to say hello. Reverend Harland was sympathetic, Mama was sure, but sometimes I caught him watching her, his eyes clouded over. Miss Hannah said, to anyone who would listen, “You can’t trust a woman without a man to fix anything in a man’s heart. How she know what wrong if she never even live with a man up close? You can’t trust a woman without a man to ever understand what’s needed,” and though most people ignored Miss Hannah, you could feel the air shift around Mama when she entered a room, as if people were deciding something about her.

At night, she no longer disappeared into the trees of her mind but, instead, had me sit across from her while she drilled me on the habits of all the plants in the garden, of the uses of the parts of tongues and