Libertie Kaitlyn Greenidge (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies? I rolled petals over my lips and between my teeth until my mouth was sour with them. I’d read so many poems comparing beauty and love to flowers, but no one talked of how much they actually stung your tongue.

My haunches ached, from squatting. Finally, I stood up, placed my hand on the small of my back, and stretched backward to keep the hem of my gown out of the dirt. Then I left the garden and went back up the stairs, to wait for my groom and my mother.

Our wedding, I do not remember well. I only remember the sadness and shock from the loss of Miss Hannah. Madame Elizabeth and I cut the hem of one of Mama’s old cloaks and tore it up into black armbands. Mama wore hers on her right arm, and I wore mine on my left, as she walked me down the aisle.

“A wife truly is a helpmate and a pillar,” Reverend Harland said as Emmanuel and I knelt before him. “She is obedient to her Lord, her husband. We cannot raise up a great nation of man without a loyal and obedient wife and mother—as she stands, as she decides, so stands and decides the fate of the Negro people. The redemption and the triumph of the Negro race will come from the hearth, will come from the home, and will spread from there to the ballot box, to the pulpit, to the world. A wife holds the world in her lap and hands it to her husband.”

While he spoke, Emmanuel and I looked straight ahead. I could see, from the corner of my eye, Emmanuel bend his head at the word “lord” and not raise it again till Reverend Harland pronounced us married. Then I turned to him. He kissed my cheek, and there was a smattering of subdued applause. He helped me to my feet, and we walked down the aisle, arm in arm, the whole church watching us.

The heat did not break. We stood out in the sun while the men shook Emmanuel’s hand and the women looked from him to me and back again and then at the waist of my dress, trying to determine if it was thicker than it had been a month before, trying to find a reason we had married so hastily or even, I saw in the petty flash of a few eyes, why he had married me at all.

Our wedding night, we slept the same we had the day before—myself in my own bedroom, my husband down below. There was a moment when Lucien had leered and Madame Elizabeth had nudged Mama—“Perhaps we should leave the house to the newlyweds”—but Mama had looked so stern the joke had died, and so no one had tried to test her.

I lay as I had only a few hours ago, restless in bed, even the thinnest of sheets oppressive. Except now, there was the scratch at the door I had waited for. I opened it, and Emmanuel stood before me. In the dark of the hallway, his skin gleamed, so pale.

“We will wait,” he said. “It is enough to wait.” And then he leaned over and kissed me, this time full on the mouth. “You taste of flowers,” he said.

“Flowers taste awful, you know.”

He smiled at me, until I returned his smile, and then he left my door.

We were to leave in three days for Haiti, accommodations Emmanuel had worked so hard to secure as soon as I’d accepted him.

Vrè lanmou pa konn danje

Real love knows no danger

Because our ship was headed to Haiti, there was no embarrassment about our berth. On Haitian ships—at least this one—colored people were allowed cabins. Already, this world was better. The ship’s captain knew Emmanuel’s father, and so we had a private cabin, given over to us with much winking and nodding, so much that I could not look anyone on board in the eye.

Mama did not come to see me off—she took her leave at her own front door. Lenore was the one who stood on the pier below us and waved the white handkerchief for us, the last little bit of home I would see for a long time, maybe until I died. That thought brought a sharp taste to my tongue, a tightness to my throat. Not tears, because I had promised myself I would not cry about saying goodbye to that world, Mama’s world; I had promised myself I would celebrate. I saw Lenore’s handkerchief flash once more, and I turned my head to spit into the ocean, to get rid of that acid within me.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in the cabin. I was seasick. I did not know this about myself, as I had never traveled for so long on a boat before. It made me hate water and curse waves as we were rolled around over and over again. My head had a dull ache. Sometimes, Emmanuel would bring me cups of musty water, flat beer, sour cider. I could not eat the biscuits and dried fish that everyone else did. Even the sight of the curled tails, studded in salt, made me turn and be sick. I was miserable.

The only relief came at night. That first one, Emmanuel lay beside me, stinking of petrified fish, and told me to lie down on my stomach. “Take off your nightgown,” he said.

I should have felt scared or shy. If I was a good woman, I would have felt trepidation at the first person besides Mama to see me whole. But all I felt was the roll of the waves, and relief that I could get the muslin off my sweaty skin.

I shut my eyes tight while he traced a botany lesson on my skin with a single finger

“Dorstenia,” he said. “It looks like a tiny tree, crowned with a shooting star. You