Libertie Kaitlyn Greenidge (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

He paused to take a sip from his cup of water, and I lowered my eyes and kept them down as he continued.

“So it seemed my father had gambled well, and he was very proud. But, as you can imagine, it was quite a shock for a young boy such as myself to be spirited away from Baltimore to Haiti. The first year there was very hard—my brothers died, as did two of my sisters. Before the year was over, my mother died, too. That left only myself and my sister Ella. And my father, of course.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, but he just blinked and continued.

“The second year, my father was able to begin to raise funds for his ministry, and our farm there, and so life became a bit easier. My father remains there. I plan to return, as I hope all freeborn men do one day. Perhaps even Lucien will come, if we can tempt him.”

Lucien looked up, momentarily shocked at this, but he recovered. “Leave Philadelphia for Haiti and the rule of Negroes?” he said, and rolled his eyes.

Madame Elizabeth laughed and slapped his arm, and I saw Emmanuel Chase’s gaze harden, his lips grow even thinner.

“It’s where our people’s ambition lies,” he said.

But Lucien shook his head. “My father’s Haitian, it’s true,” he said, “but I am an American by birth, and I’ll stay here in her land, if I please.”

“You’d stay here even as they kill us for trying to vote? You’d stay here even as they cut us down in Colfax and in Hamburg?”

“We’ll fight them back,” Lucien said. “We’ll win in the end. The white men will learn that colored people mean business.”

“You have too much faith in white folks,” Emmanuel Chase said.

Lucien said, “You have not enough faith in colored people.”

“Do you know a story my father used to tell me?” Emmanuel said. “He used to work with a white family just past Baltimore. He would send people their way, when they were escaping. But he had to stop when one of them told them what the white people were doing—inviting slave owners over for dinner and then asking everyone to debate the slave question, together, at the table. Black men, scared and tired and just trying to run, forced to sit and prove how worthy they were to the very men who should have been apologizing to them—”

“Emmanuel,” Mama said. If it had been me getting angry, Mama would have stopped the whole conversation. She would have tried to drown my rage. But here was only a very quiet “Emmanuel,” which he ignored.

“You can’t ever be free in a place like that,” he said. “In a house that runs by those rules. I can tell you, no one in Haiti has ever asked for such an indignity. It is our own republic. It’s for colored men such as us.”

“But they are not Christians,” Experience said. “They are papists.”

“And cannibals,” Lucien said.

Emmanuel looked pained, as if Lucien had reached across the table and slapped him. “Your father would let you speak of his country like that?”

“He is who told me this of his country!” Lucien said. “Colored people are a cursed lot, but at least in our good fortune, we are cursed in the good Christian nation of America, where good government and understanding of God prevail—”

“You say that as they riot any time we try to sit in a railway car,” Emmanuel said.

“Those are only potholes on the road to progress. We will prevail. We have the tradition of good Anglo-Saxon law and fairness to guide us. Haiti has none of that. We could go there, I suppose, to raise them up—now, I agree with you on that. As good Christian Negroes, we should act as a mother to our race, to bring it up to manhood.”

“But there’s still so much to be done here,” Mama said.

Emmanuel had that pained look again, the one that had creased his face when Lucien called his countrymen cannibals. It momentarily flashed across his face, and then it was gone, suppressed. He looked at Mama with polite interest, though I was beginning to think that underneath, he was burning the same way I did.

He turned back to Lucien. “None of us will ever triumph,” he said, “until we are completely free.” Emmanuel may have sat at the head of the table, but he would not have dared to say this directly to Mama.

“But what does freedom mean?” I said. I could not help myself. I had heard something in his voice then that I thought—that I believed, that I flattered myself, that I hoped—was only for me.

The table stopped to look at me. My mother, I saw, looked the hardest. It was as if she was seeing me for the first time. But all I could think was, I have embarrassed her again. She wishes I was not her daughter, that clever Emmanuel was her son.

I closed my eyes, wishing I had not spoken.

“It means,” Emmanuel said, his voice shaking, either from excitement or dread, I could not tell yet, “that we are wholly in charge of our own destiny.”

“And we seize it, apparently, with violence and blood,” Lucien said, “if we are to follow the Haitian model. That does not sound like freedom to me. Freedom goes hand in hand with peace and harmony and prosperity. But did you ever notice”—he leaned over to Louisa—“how the lightest ones burn brightest for revolution? Why is that?”

“They’re closest to freedom and can taste it, so they’ll do anything for it,” Louisa said, laughing. She had begun to relax and regain her playfulness.

Emmanuel Chase laughed along, but he wouldn’t look at her. He only said to Lucien, “Revolution already happened there.”

“Here, too. Twice,” Lucien replied. “It’s hard work, but we’ll prevail. Colored men will be free. And in the meantime, I don’t have to speak French.”

“It would give your father great pleasure if you did,” Madame Elizabeth said.

Lucien slapped his hand on the table. “Mwen se