Libertie Kaitlyn Greenidge (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

do it maybe a year and a half after the hospital was open, after the fourth or fifth charity bazaar the LIS had run that came back with diminishing funds. All over the country, colored people were building things that seemed bigger than Mama’s hospital for women, that the colored men and white people preferred to fund.

The possibilities for colored people seemed so many, so varied, each more fantastic than the last, but which one was right and which one should they choose? If I could have, I would have chosen all of them—every idea, one after the other, seemed correct. A school for freedmen; a letter service to reunite those separated by the auction block; a caravan to Canada; another one to Kansas; Mama’s hospital. Why can’t we have all of it, all of it? I wanted to say.

The Ladies’ Intelligence Society told Mama they could not raise the money solely for her hospital, in the way that they could during the war. And certainly not solely for a hospital just for colored women, when colored men were back and needed healing more. “We do not like it,” Miss Annie said, “but we think people will be more amenable to your cause if we raise money for you and other things.”

Mama did not even bat an eye. She only nodded, once, and said, “Well, then.”

And so Mama decided to change the hospital name. “It’s a sign of the reconciliation, of the harmony of the times we now live in,” Mama said to me and Lenore as we stood beside her, looking up at the boy on his ladder in the street. “Here it is, only two years after the end of the war, and white women will sit side by side colored women in our hospital waiting room, willing to be treated because they know, deep down, their organs are the same.”

But I knew, and she knew, this was not true. Because after the boy came down off his ladder, she had him put a rod up on the waiting room ceiling, and then she instructed Lenore to hang a scrap of red velvet on it, to make a little curtain, so that the new patients she admitted, the white women, could pull the curtain shut and avoid the sight of colored women beside them.

The white women came because Mama was colored but not too colored. In fact, her color worked in her favor. She would never be invited to a dinner party, or a lecture, or sit across from them in a private club. They would never run into her in their worlds and be reminded of their most embarrassing ailments: a stubborn and treacherous womb, smelly fluids, bodies insisting on being rude and offensive. Mama could restore these women’s bodies back to what they wished them to be, make them well enough to join this world again—and they would never encounter her in their real lives, this woman who knew exactly what was beneath their skirts.

The first time I touched one of these new white-woman patients, she flinched. I remember, she was only a few years older than me, a young bride who’d come in with thrush between her legs, too embarrassed to see her own doctor and be found out. Found out of what? I wrote to my woman in the water.

I grasped the white woman’s elbow to help her to the examination table, which she did not mind, and then I began to feel at her middle, as Mama had instructed at the start of the appointment, and she batted my hands away. “Off me,” she said. And when Mama looked up, from where she was standing in the corner, preparing for the examination, the woman said, “Your girl is molesting me.”

And Mama, my brave mama, did not come to my aid. She only narrowed her eyes slightly, and then she said, “Come take notes, Libertie,” and she herself went to touch the woman’s middle.

And so I understood. Mama was light enough that the white women did not feel awkward when her hands touched them. Mama, to them, was not all the way black. When the black women they knew outside the hospital touched the white women, they touched them with what they told themselves to be dumb hands. They did not have to imagine those hands as belonging to anyone, least of all someone thinking and feeling. But I’d touched that white woman with a knowing of what was deepest inside her, and she’d recoiled—it was beyond her imagination.

After that, I noticed how the white-woman patients watched me while I assisted Mama. They stared at where my dress tightened on my chest, at the roundness of my arms, at where my skirt darted at my hips—stared openly, because they knew I would not rebuke them—and then they would sigh, exasperated, and look away.

The older ones, I could understand their jealousy—the jealousy of age for youth, I thought it was. Dried up corncobs, I wrote of them in my never-ending letter to the woman in the water. But the patients about my age, I did not understand. I had grown up free, only around colored people, and I could not fathom their scrutiny.

And Mama chose them over me, every time.

When the women flinched, when they scowled at my body, Mama ignored them. Sometimes, she said, “Come stand here, Libertie,” so that I was out of their eyesight. But Mama, dear Mama, my fierce Mama, never told them to stop.

Mama acted as though the white women’s pain was the same as ours. As if when they cried, they grieved for the same things lost that we did. Mama did not seem to mind that a woman who came to our waiting room and sat on the other side of the velvet curtain could not be comfortable. Even when she came at her most vulnerable, when she had to be vigilant for some sort of abuse, she had to stare at that velvet curtain and wonder if