Libertie Kaitlyn Greenidge (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

I spent a lot of time in the outbuilding that had been newly designated as a library, books piled all around me, not reading a word. Instead, I read the books’ frontpieces. Many had been donated by churches from across the East. There was an entire lot from one congregation in Philadelphia; another from a congregation in Albany, a stack that had the x’s and handprints of a flock in Virginia. I would trace all the names of all these people who believed that I could be part of a bright shining future, but I couldn’t bear to turn the page and begin to read.

It had been very easy to denounce Mama to her face and call her a traitor in my heart. I’d thought it was painful, but it was the easiest thing in the world compared with sitting here, feeling the weight of my mother’s expectations and the world’s indifference to my failure and my self. Mrs. Grady had taken to calling to me, as I left for class, “Go on, Black Gal, make me proud,” and though I smiled at her each time she said it, knew she meant it with love, I could only hear a lie in her voice.

My rage at the world returned whenever I sat in that library. I knew what a stronger girl would do—sip her wrath like corn liquor, have it drench her ambition, sweat the rage out her pores as she worked harder and better, be smarter. But instead I suckled my anger like Lenore did the abandoned offspring of the barn cats, and it was about as effective as one of those little animals, doing nothing but mewling and flipping over in distress.

I knew I was not strong enough to touch a hundred white abdomens while feeling their contempt, while Mama stood beside me saying nothing. I did not think I was strong enough to pretend, even ten years on now, that the sons and husbands and fathers of the white women who sat behind our clinic’s velvet curtain hadn’t marked our houses with red chalk for destruction. And I knew, like the ache of a broken bone that hadn’t been set right, that I was not strong enough to be faced with another Mr. Ben, and to fail him, and to have to live with that failure for the rest of my days.

I was not strong enough for this world, is what I meant, and it was a low-down, worming thing to discover about yourself when all around you, men and women who had been beaten, scorned, burnt, drowned, still found a way to come to this silence and sit within it and answer questions about what a lung was good for.

I began to think there must be something wrong with me: that I was slow or stupid, or merely ungrateful. Most of all, I felt a deep, burning shame in the center of my chest, that I could not work my rage better. When Mama was my same age, she had already finished her studies and was submitting herself to examination after examination, to try to enter medical school. She was working, in the evenings, with the local pharmacist, to learn how pills were made, and she was conducting her own experiments, and writing to friends to send the latest medical books to her to study.

But here I was, with an entire library open to me at midday, and I couldn’t read a word.

I was only dull, hidden Libertie.

Dear Libertie,

You must make sure to ask that the latest anatomy books be found for you. The following is a comprehensive list of authors to trust:

Dear Mama,

The college’s library is tolerable. The books have been donated by many kind churches. I’ve read the frontpieces of each and seen books from

Drs. Henshaw, Borley, Crawley and Madison and Fredricks (the older)

Ohio, Delaware, Virginia (of course), Connecticut, and even Maine.

For your review, I present you the following case: A girl came with Adipsia.

I must say that I miss you, and even Lenore (tell her she’s a busybody), and if I

She had neither appetite nor thirst, and the thought of food was disgusting.

could but see you & stand beside you two & hear your voices,

So, in your professional opinion (ha), my good girl, what would you give

I would perhaps not be so lonely here, with you, but that’s a silly thing

as remedy?

to wish, I know.

This impotent anger was another kind of grave. I thought I would be buried in it on campus, until one day when Madeline Grady chased me out of her house and told me to stay at the college for the evening “with the youth your own age.” So one evening, when the dark came sooner, I did not hurry home to the Gradys’ but wandered around campus until a few girls told me to follow them. And that is when I heard it. It was the queerest thing to hear the sound of a piano at night, outside, but I could hear it—the deep tones of the notes and then after it, the whisper of the hammer hitting the strings, because it was an older piano and someone was tuning it.

Music at night, music after dark, music finding its way to you across sweetgrass, can feel almost like magic.

A bunch of students, men and women, had gathered in one of the music classrooms, where a slanting upright piano had been pushed against a wall. Standing at it were two women, pushing the keys. It was a student-run affair—the room was decorated with holly and ivy, and there was hot cider, donated by one of the farms, and roasted apples and sugared biscuits. It was so hot that the windows were open to the cold night air, and from where I stood, pressed against one of them, my back stung with cold and the full front of me steamed with discomfort.

The first to perform was a sleek and chubby boy who had memorized his own