Libertie Kaitlyn Greenidge (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

in my own hand but elongated to look like Mama’s, I stood up before them all and sang the love my mama had for the women there. The love she would have sung, if she’d had the voice for it.

True women friends are fine and rare

You search for them, here and there

The bonds between us bloom like a rose

For we are companions true affection has chose

Within our hearts lie trust and faith

Our true friendship, bonds will never break

Mama was not a good poet. Neither, at fourteen, was I.

But those women heard that awful poetry and smiled and clapped, and when I revealed it was my mama who wrote it, they said, “Very fine, Dr. Sampson. Very fine indeed.” It was as if she had proven that she was one of them again, because she could praise them so warmly, even if the praise was clumsy. Maybe because of that. It was what they had been waiting for, and there was a kind of thawing in their relations.

Even rude love is better than no show of love at all. That must be why you took Ben Daisy, I thought to the woman in the water.

That is how I remember the rest of the war: my hands covered in the flour dust from long-baked biscuits at the bottom of the tin of love poems, the tips of my fingers stained with black ink, and Mama searching for every opportunity to be useful. I learned during the war how to scheme for the best way to set the world right, to change it. And I knew that this change was wrapped up in the love notes these women wrote to one another and dropped into a box, even as the world around us burnt.

Which world was burning, anyways? I wrote this question out to her, the woman in the water. After each meeting of the Ladies’ Intelligence Society, I took what little bits were left of the poems and made a book of my own.

What did Ben Daisy say she liked? Pink and white and gold. Cakes and candy. Scent bottles and silk. I left pansies alone, but I collected everything else I could for her.

These things were hard to come by in our hamlet. We did not eat or buy sugar, because slaves made it—Mama was one of the few who were righteous enough to observe this boycott. But then, with the war, it wasn’t to be had anyways. So I took to dripping honey in the pages of the book, underlining each question to the lady with a thick golden smear. Into the honey, I pressed flower petals, and then I let the page dry and started another one.

The songs I wrote in my book were made for the woman under the water, the one who offered something other than this world.

Is the water really better?

Should we all just try to drown?

Is your love better than this world?

Which world is burning, anyways?

I thought it was the world that drove Ben Daisy under the water, that kept Pete Back Back pocked with sores, that conspired to steal and beat and kill the children of the women around as soon as they left their wombs. So, what was there, really, to mourn? In annihilation, I saw a celebration. My book to the lady became a place to celebrate the destruction of all the devices of this world that had tried to snare my people and snap us in two, that had sworn to kill every last one of us one way or another.

And even as the wider world did not agree, did not even care what the women around me thought or believed, discounted colored women as entirely irrelevant—the thing to remember, I learned, was that these women, here, loved one another and cared for one another as no other. Even for my shifty, jumpy, defeated Mama, they cared. And from that care grew a steady foundation.

When the war ended, I ran through the streets with everyone else, crying and saying my hosannas. Finally, the world I had dreamt of, had prayed for, was on its way.

A bunch of us colored girls and boys ran all the way down to the waterfront. We danced on the boards of the wharf, and I even leaned over the side to whisper into the waves of the water a “Thank you.” I half believed, even though I knew I was fooling myself, that this was all her doing.

We left the riverbank at dawn, headed for home, and I walked backward the whole way, while the other girls laughed and the boys called me silly. I looked toward the river. I watched the sky for fires and probed the earth for blood.

Now, the newspapers were full of longing, not battles. White people longing for their sons’ bodies, hoping they were whole. If their bodies did not come back intact, then what would happen to these good white Christian boys on Judgment Day? They would stand up in their graves and topple back down, as on some overgrown battlefield their errant leg or lost foot would rise without the rest of them. They made it sound like a horror. But I read each notice as the reports rolled in during that jostling year after the war, and prayed to the woman who had taken Ben Daisy under Keep their arms scattered and their legs separated. Keep them without integrity when Judgment Day comes.

It was a small price to pay, in my opinion. The war had broken bodies apart, and that seemed to be what caused so much terror among the whites, what made them shoot their own president. But I had stood in Culver’s back room and seen the people broken from slavery, I had held that orphan girl in my arms, I had seen so many die from those same white people’s hatred that I could not muster any sympathy for their terror, and I could definitely not feel it on my own.

They did not care