Libertie Kaitlyn Greenidge (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

lwa yo. It was a few weeks ago, she said, and she was so tired afterward she nearly did not make breakfast the next morning. Yon lwa who had mounted her turns her devotees into unruly children, begging everyone for sweets, curving their backs against the swats to come. Ti Me had stood in the circle and cried like a baby, crawled on her knees and stuffed her fingers into her mouth while the spirit acted through her.

“It isn’t frightening when that happens?”

Ti Me cracked a nut on the worktable. “Why would I be scared?”

“Because you have no control over yourself. You lose yourself. You lost your freedom and died in the spirit of something else.”

“Eh,” Ti Me said. “Everything born dies, no?”

Emmanuel came back to me at night, but it was no longer only to me. It was a mirror of the lessons we had learned on the boat to Haiti, except that now, instead of talking to me of flowers, he manipulated the skin of my stomach, pressing hard.

“Do you remember,” I said, “not so long ago, teaching me to swim?”

“Of course,” he said. He was watching my stomach rise and fall with my breath.

“You could touch me like that, again, if you wished.”

“The time for that is over for now,” he said.

At dinner each night, as Bishop Chase and Ella listened, he questioned what I had done with my days indoors.

“What did you eat?”

“Which cistern did you drink from?”

“How many hours did you rest?”

“Did you walk the length of the hall three times, or ten?”

“I do not think,” I said after the fourth night of this, “that your father and Ella want to hear every detail of my confinement.”

“On that we agree,” Ella said cheerfully. “I do not.”

“Ella, stop.” Emmanuel turned to me. “It is something we should be proud of. And it is their future, too.”

“It is not,” I said in a rush of anger. “It is mine.”

There was a silence while Emmanuel looked down at his plate, chastened.

“You will explain to her?” Bishop Chase was speaking to Emmanuel. Never to me.

“There’s nothing to explain,” I said.

Bishop Chase kept chewing slowly, then swallowed and took a sip from his glass. “Ti Me, a bit more please.”

“Libertie,” Emmanuel said, “I will resolve it later.”

I pushed myself back from the table as best I could and walked to the courtyard stoop, to stare at the night sky.

It was not clear if the face of the moon that looked down on me now was the same one that looked down on my mother. And in that loneliness, I felt a longing for her so violent that it made me rise up from the stoop and begin to pace.

“You know,” I heard. “Emmanuel really does love you.”

I looked up. It was Ella, standing in the light from the doorway.

“I suppose.”

“You know,” Ella said, “when we were sixteen—”

“I do not wish to hear childhood stories right now, Ella.”

“When we were sixteen,” she said, “I saw my father stick his finger in the coo coo of every serving girl up and down this street, including Ti Me. I told Emmanuel what I saw, and he said not to lie, never to lie. I told Papa what I saw, and he struck me and told me if I did not behave, I would have to stay in the house forever.

“Emmanuel said then to me what he said to you. That he would fix it with Papa. And then I knew he loved me. He told me to try very hard to forgive Papa, and he would fix it. And I did.

“Emmanuel told Papa I was sick. He told everyone I was sick. My friends have believed I was sick since we were sixteen. But he told me just to pretend. And it has been a little secret between us. I did not want you to know. You are so young, and I did not think you would understand. But you should. The world thinks you are mad … It’s the greatest freedom I’ve ever known. Emmanuel gave that to me.

“I say whatever I wish to anyone. What colored woman in this world has that? Not a one, not a one anywhere on this Earth. You felt it when you first came, no? I can sew it into a million little words. I am free to speak my mind. Emmanuel did that for me, and he’ll do it for you.

Ella held out her hand. “Because he really loves you.”

Freedom was Ben Daisy choosing the bottom of the water over its surface, and the Graces singing, and Mama leaving me to put myself together in the loam, and the woman with the white chalked face, a pepper falling from her ear, dancing for the dead.

I knew what freedom was, and I knew I did not have it as I lay in bed beside Emmanuel, hissing in the dark, wary of what words would fall over the gaps in the ceiling above us.

“Your father is a monster. Your sister is lost.”

“She is not completely lost. She told you herself.”

“You would have me live that existence?”

“No. If you would be sensible. If you would trust me. If you would hold on. You would see, we only have to please him for a little while longer to be free.”

“How much longer?”

“When the child is born, if it’s a son, he will be more agreeable. My father and I are opposed—you know this. You cannot believe that I am the same as him.”

“You’ve condemned your sister to … I am not even sure what kind of existence.”

“She trusts me. As you should trust me.”

“Why should I trust you if you don’t even understand what is wrong?”

“You are being impossible, Libertie.” He turned his back to me. The mattress creaked. “Papa … what he is doing is no different than what the slave masters used to do to our foremothers. Where do you think your mother’s pretty color came from? Where do you think mine did?”

“But that does not