Libertie Kaitlyn Greenidge (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

you learned at mine and Elizabeth’s knee … the lesson of escape! You turned something so good and righteous against me. You’ve used it to your own earthly ends. I cannot think of a more wicked girl than you, and you know I’ve known my share. You are a deceiver. You are an escape artist. You are a liar.

You chose that man over doing the hard and right thing.

You chose indolence and lust over hard work and humility.

I have no doubt that Emmanuel Chase believes that he loves you. I think you have convinced yourself that you love him. But you know and I know that what you have done is wrong and you have ruined our dreams, your dreams, for what you think is love.

It is not love, Libertie.

Love would not make you think you had to flee your only mother.

You will probably never answer me now. You will probably continue to ignore my letters to you. So be it! So be it! So be it! Know that I hold this against you, though, Libertie. Know how you’ve made your mother rage.

You sat in my waiting room and looked down your nose at me and told me I was not trying hard enough. That I did not understand how to change the world.

You sneered at the white women I courted to keep you in nice dresses and pay for your classes. You stopped only short of calling me a traitor, and it is you who have betrayed me! Who has broken me. Who has deceived me. Who stood before me in a wedding gown and said, “I love you, Mama.” Who gave up your virtue to a silly man so that you would not have to face the truth with me. I see it now.

So all is lost. So you have chosen that life, irrevocably. Do you know a part of me still held out hope you would find your way back to this path? That if I let you go, you would return? But you were already gone, long gone, and did not even bother to tell your mother of it.

You are a fool, and so am I.

Your

Mama

This letter came on a Sunday, after church, and when I read it, it went with the others in the back of the drawer, and I almost cried, I did, that she knew the worst part of me.

But Emmanuel called me down to dinner, and he put his hands on my shoulder and he said, “What is wrong?”

And I was still good to him, in his eyes, so I said, “Nothing,” and I resolved I would not answer my mother again. Not for a long time.

When you learn to swim, your body is no longer your own. It becomes enthralled to another dimension, that of the water. Your limbs are weightless, but you can feel your hair and clothes becoming heavy.

“Do you open your eyes underwater?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said.

So while I practiced floating, I imagined him just under the surface, eyes open and staring up at me. I was not sure, in that moment, which one of us possessed the other.

This will always be our life together, I told myself as I followed him back down the mountain. I truly believed, then, that this was the start of the world he had promised me. I thought of our time in the pool as his gift to me. During the week, he still would not permit me to join him in his medical work. He said he was not ready yet. Monday mornings in the empty house became easier, though. Ella and I sat side by side or walked to the market together, but my spirit was still on the water.

“You are not so different from me,” Ella said after a few weeks of this. She sat in the parlor, with her embroidery still on her lap.

“I do not think I am so different,” I lied.

“You do. You think you are better than me,” Ella said. “Pride is not attractive on a woman.”

“I assure you, I am humbled.”

“Fanm pale nan tou de bò bouch yo.”

“What does that mean?” I said.

“Three months, and you still have less of a grasp on the language than a baby.” Ella still had her head bent over her sewing.

I closed my eyes. Willed myself to remember floating on the water.

“What is it that you’ve worked on for so many weeks?” I said finally. “Surely you are done?”

She lifted her head. She slit her eyes at me. Then she held up what was in her lap. A jacket, which she held by the shoulders and gave a good shake so that it uncrumpled.

I got up from my seat and went to sit beside her. “May I?” I said.

She nodded.

I took the garment in my hands and turned it over. Close embroidery in that bright red thread. I held it nearer to my eyes. It was words. An incantation. Maybe even a history. I could only make out a few of the words, but I realized she had embroidered a whole story on this jacket in Kreyòl.

“What does it mean?” I said.

“You are like a child, always asking that.”

I stuck my thumb into my mouth and hummed, like a baby would. I had the satisfaction of startling her into a laugh.

“Your estimations are always correct, Ella.”

“Stop.”

“I am an infant and, as such, would be delighted if you schooled me in this.”

She looked at me. I raised my thumb back to my mouth. “All right,” she said. “He hasn’t told you, has he, yet, of the bad year we had here?”

“When your mother and brothers passed. Yes.”

“He has not told you, though, what else happened?”

“No,” I said.

“We were thirteen,” she said. “We had been here three years. We knew the language so well by then. There was a great crime, in Port-au-Prince. We lived there then—we had not yet come here to build the church in Jacmel. A man had sold his niece to the Vodoun priests,