Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (best short novels .txt) 📗

I had never seen smoke mix with fog like that before, how it hovered like a curtain between this world and maybe the next, from light to dark, from heaven to hell, from sleep to consciousness. That was where the woman in the water lived even now—I knew it. I knew it in my bones. And I felt how foolishly I had spent the last year, looking for her in common well water, when she was here all along. While I stood with the women on the dock as they tried to see what was coming to them through the veil, I prayed to her, that woman,

Let ’em through, let ’em through, LET ’EM THROUGH.

I heard the tiniest drop of a wave, the sound a fish makes when it turns over on the surface of the water and falls back to its home. Was that her? Was that her byword? I thought it was. I knew it was, because the next thing I saw, finally, was something nosing its way through the clouds.

It was a long boat, with four rowers—two at the bow, two at the stern—followed by two more. As they got closer, I could see that the rowers had kerchiefs wrapped around their mouths, to keep from breathing in the smoke as they worked, and their hats pulled down over their eyes, to keep them from stinging in the wind. Between the rowers, on the boats, were tens of children. What was most eerie about it all was that the only sound was the water slapping the oars. Even the babies were silent.

But then the first boat docked, and the women all around me took in a deep breath, and they began to sing.

Deep                                        river,

                             my

home

            is

                    over

                            Jordan

Deep

            river,

                    my

                            home

                    is

                            over

                                    Jordan

By the time we got to the chorus, a baby in one of the boats began to cry, a big robust yell, as if he was trying to harmonize with us. And the women all around me broke out in whoops. “That’s it,” Miss Annie called out. “Keep it up.” And then the other babies began to cry, as well, and I have never seen a group of women happier to hear a bunch of infants bawling at five in the morning.

We got the children out of the boats. A girl my age, her face streaked with soot, her arms covered in scratches, her skirts dark with something damp, held a fat baby in her arms. When she clambered off the boat and up onto the dock, she looked at me, looked in my eyes, came straight toward me, and handed the baby off before crouching down to sit, lowering her head to enter the peace of the fabric stretched between her knees. Mama saw her, saw the stain on her skirt, and went to her first, shielding her with her body so the others couldn’t see or hear what she was asking.

I carried that baby all the way back to our house. She was not yet a year old, by the look of her. Still too young to walk. She lay against my chest. I could feel her spittle pool on the front of my dress. She was so heavy, and with every step, I could feel her chest rise and fall. It unnerved me. I tried to match her rhythm, to breathe along with her, but her heart was beating too fast. Still, despite all this, she would look around, keep her eyes wide open, staring at something in the tree branches above us—part of the past, or the present, or maybe the future, that I could not see. I kept praying to the woman in the water, even as every step took me farther from her. Don’t take this one with you. Keep her here with us. Let her spirit leave the water and come with me to land.

The baby was still in my arms at noon, when we had gotten some of the survivors to our houses, some of them to the church.

“You can put the baby down,” Mama told me.

I looked up at her. “I can’t,” I said. By which I meant if I gave up the weight of that baby, the whole weight of what had happened across the river—the fire and the hangings and the beatings and the white women dashing babies’ brains and whatever had been done to that girl from the boat who had handed me the baby, that had made her hold her dress between her thighs—all of that weight would take the baby’s place, and I knew I was not strong enough to hold it. Not yet. Not then. Even if I made a million prayers to the woman in the water, I knew it wouldn’t help.

And Mama, my mama, she looked at me and she understood. She said, “This is the hardest part of our work.” She said, “Keep the baby close if you need to. But you can’t carry her all the time.” And she had me sit in the nicer armchair in the parlor while the women of our town crowded into the room.

They had gathered there, all sweating in the full heat of the day, their apron fronts and pinafores damp, their voices merging together into a new song, this one made up of just the question they asked one another in the room over and over again:

What to do?

“Look at that baby’s skin,” Miss Dinah said, gazing at the girl in my arms. “Covered in rashes, even worse than the singe from the burns.”

“And that little boy who rode with me in the cart, his feet were too tore up to walk.” Miss Hannah said this, in a hollow voice, looking straight ahead, back to being stuck in between this world and the one with her brother in the water.

“That one,” Miss Clara said, pointing to the baby still slumped in my arms, “her father left her with the orphanage when