Libertie Kaitlyn Greenidge (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

“I did not know you were such a patriot,” Louisa said.

“Oh, but I am.” Lucien leaned back in his chair and began to sing the first few verses of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” in the nasal tones of a northerner. “Please join me,” he said.

Louisa scoffed. “I have a voice to preserve,” she said, which made the whole table laugh, except for Emmanuel, who sat back, quiet.

It was hard to get a look at him, because every time I glanced at his face he stared back at me.

My mother declared that the Graces should sleep in my room, with me, and Madame Elizabeth should sleep in her room, with her, leaving Lucien to sleep with Emmanuel in Mama’s old examination room, which Emmanuel would take, now that I was home. As the sleeping arrangements were announced, I watched Louisa and Experience’s faces, closely, but neither one gave anything away. I imagined that they held hands underneath the table, and I felt a rush of sadness. I cupped my own hand, under the lace tablecloth, around empty air, and imagined what it would feel like for another hand to rest there.

I did not want to be in the room alone with them while we all undressed and pretended that none of us knew what had happened. I didn’t think I could bear to hear any of the excuses they would give for why they had not opened the door at Madame Elizabeth’s. It felt, perhaps, even more lonely-making to know they had not trusted me with the truth. So I made a show of announcing I would sit on the porch for a bit before bed.

“I missed the garden,” I told my mother.

Lenore tilted her head. “Leaving home really does change a person,” she said.

But Mama gave an approving smile and kissed my head before taking her candle and leading Madame Elizabeth off, so that they could gossip in peace in her room.

I sat on the porch for a bit, listening to the saw of flies all around the house in the night. It felt like the world was still drowsy from the winter, nothing alive out there in the dark was at its full pitch yet. I counted one Mississippi after another, trying to leave enough time for Experience and Louisa. I grew uncertain, though, if I had waited long enough, and so I stood up from the porch and walked out into the yard, trying to see if the candle was still burning in my room upstairs.

I tilted my head back. I could see the flare of light, where the flame sat on the windowsill of my room. I sighed, waiting for when the two of them would feign sleep and I could return to lie in my own bed, a stranger among friends.

“You hold yourself like that and you could swallow the moon.”

I jerked my head back, and there was Emmanuel Chase, coming down the porch steps to stand with me.

I think I’d known that it would be this way. I think, if I was being honest, I’d hoped that it would.

He smiled, pleased with himself for the bit of poetry. “My nurse used to say that to me, when I was little.”

“A nurse?”

But he was not flustered. He nodded and drew a very short, fat cigar out of his jacket pocket. He sucked on the end but did not move to light it. Not yet.

“It is like that in Haiti,” he said. “The better families have servants.”

“Other Negroes?”

“The people who live in the country, yes. They’re used to work like that.”

I blinked.

“I sound hinkty,” he said.

“You haven’t forgotten that word, at least, with all the French you speak.”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten. Wherever there’s niggers in this world, you need to have a word for uppity.”

I laughed at that, and he smiled wide again. It was a kind of agreement between us.

I stepped back to look up at the window again, to hide my excitement. The candle still burnt.

Emmanuel came to stand beside me and tilted his head back, as well. Then he said, his voice lower, so that no one in the house could hear him,

“My nurse, we learned to call her Ti Me. It means Little Mother. She would tell me stories about the gods. Haiti has different gods than here. They came from Africa, on the ships with the Negro slaves, and stayed—they did not forsake the Negroes there, like they did the Negroes here. They are always around us there.”

“You weren’t scared?”

“No,” he said, still looking up at the window. “My sister was scared and thought it was all heathen nonsense. But I loved them. Ti Me told me a story about the god who has the moon. The goddess. ‘Yon lwa’ is what Ti Me would say. She is called La Sirèn—”

“Haiti has sirens then? Mermaids, like here?”

“She lives under the water, yes. She rules the oceans—she is as changeable as a wave.”

I shivered. “I knew someone once, who used to speak nonsense like that.”

He sucked on the end of the cigar again, a sound almost like a kiss, which made my stomach lurch.

“Really?” he said. “So you’ve already heard of La Sirèn, who is so beautiful she takes men underwater with her, who possesses her subjects and makes them walk as though they had fins for legs. And they gasp—oh, they gasp—because they cannot breathe air anymore, and the only way to get them to stop is to douse them with water. I have seen it myself, as a boy, in the temples Ti Me took me to.

“Sometimes, La Sirèn gets jealous and she’ll drown a man and take him down under and teach him her magic. When he comes back to the surface, his skin is light, as bright as mine, and his hair is straight, and he knows all about the world.”

“Is that why you look like that, then?”

He laughed. “But you told me you already knew all about her. That another man has already told you this