Libertie Kaitlyn Greenidge (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

The road got steeper. The dust rose to my eyes, making them even wetter. By the time we reached the house, Emmanuel had begun to walk many feet ahead of me, overwhelmed by the tears on my face.

When Emmanuel had whispered to me in my mother’s waiting room about his father’s house, I admit I had not paid much attention to his actual words. It was from his tone, the urgency of how he described it, that I had imagined it as something much grander than what was before me. He had spoken lovingly of the large shuttered windows that faced the street. Of the front veranda his father had built, with the iron railings. Of the oak front door that was always kept shut and, cut into it, the smaller door that the family used to pass in and out of the house. “We only open the doors proper,” Emmanuel had told me, “when someone in our family dies.”

The actual house that was before me was shorter than what I had pictured, but still impressive. The wood was painted a pale pink, and the black iron railings were winking in the sun. Emmanuel’s father had been given the land when he came to Haiti ten years before—the promise to American Negro settlers fulfilled. He had traveled up and down the island, writing to the mother church back home, until they gave him the money to build a house worthy of the bishop that he was. At the very top of the house’s flat roof was a weather vane with the imprint of an iron rooster. It was strange to have on a house in a place that felt as if wind had not been born yet, I thought, as I looked above and felt the sweat trickle down my neck.

At the front door, the mule driver untied our two trunks from the back of the animal and said something to Emmanuel. A joke—because Emmanuel threw back his head and laughed, and tipped him an extra coin.

“What was it?” I asked, wiping the sleeve of my dress across my face, trying to rub it clean of dirt and tears.

“He only noticed you crying,” Emmanuel said. “And teased me about it.”

“What did he say?”

“You have to learn the language sometime, Libertie,” he said.

I thought at first he had arranged for the household to greet us; inside the hall, three people stood in a straight line. His father broke form first—a man a few inches shorter than Emmanuel, so just about level with my height. He was the same complexion as Emmanuel. He reached out to shake his son’s hand. But he did not extend one to me, only blinked.

Beside him was Ti Me. She, too, was not quite how Emmanuel had described her. In Kings County, he had told me that Ti Me had been young once but had dedicated her youth to raising him, after his mother and siblings had died. I had pictured a woman old and bent, with gray hair. But the woman who stepped forward to greet me was probably at most thirty. Her skin was smooth. And she had bright, intelligent eyes, which darted over Emmanuel’s face, then my own. She embraced him, as his father had, and pulled at his cheeks—scolding him, I guessed, for not eating enough. She was the only person in the house as dark as me.

Beside her was a woman Emmanuel’s height. Ti Me was dressed in white, in this heat. But this woman was dressed in a rusty-red skirt and a black jacket. Her skin was as pale as Emmanuel’s and his father’s, but it had a bright-pink undertone, as if she was about to burn. Her hair hung in great stiff sections around her cheeks. Each section had been ironed once and then again, to get rid of the kink, and then violently curled. Her face was Emmanuel’s, but leaner. His twin, Ella, I realized, with a start.

“And who is this?” she said as I stood beside Emmanuel.

“My wife,” he said.

“You’re married?” She raised one pale hand to her mouth.

I turned to Emmanuel. “You did not tell them?”

His father looked as if he was going to shout, and his sister was holding her stiff hair back from her face, her lips beginning to part—in a smile or a scream, I could not tell.

“You did not get my letters?” Emmanuel stepped back.

“You’ve married without my permission?” his father said. “And to whom?” He looked at me again, the whole length of me. I was, I could tell, in some way, lacking.

“Libertie Sampson. She is Dr. Sampson’s very own daughter. A physician in her own right. A graduate of Cunningham College.”

I pulled on Emmanuel’s arm to stop him, but he would not. “A true scholar,” he said.

“You married without my blessing,” his father said.

“I wrote to you to tell you. I sent three letters to you to tell you of it.”

“Who married you?” This was from his sister.

“The reverend of my church in Kings County,” I said. “Reverend Harland, whom I believe you know, Bishop Chase.”

Emmanuel’s father looked from me to his son. “You are always too rash,” he said.

I could feel myself begin to cry again. But I could see, from the corner of my eye, Emmanuel’s sister watching me. So I stepped forward and unknotted the bonnet from under my chin. Once I had gotten it off, I moved toward Ella and took her in my arms. I held her there, though I could feel her body stiffen. I felt her tortured curls scratch against my cheeks, made harsh by whatever hot comb she’d lain on them. She smelled of dried perspiration and burnt hair.

“I am sorry,” I said. “But I hope we can be sisters now.”

I let her go and hurried over to her father, avoiding whatever look was on her face. “I am sorry, sir,” I said, holding him in the same way. “I hope you can forgive your daughter.”

I held him