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

How, when the world was splitting wide open for colored women, could Mama choose to yoke herself to the very white ones who often were trying to sew it all up for us? “There’s prudence and practicality, and then there is a complete failure of imagination,” Miss Annie said shortly after Mama took colored off her sign, and that was all any self-respecting member of the LIS allowed themselves to say in front of me.

There was no drawn-out fight. The women in the group did not argue that way. Instead, one Sunday at church, our pew was empty, except for us. No one gathered around Mama’s seat as soon as the sermon was over, as they had when we were plotting. We were back to the same loneliness we’d lived in after Ben Daisy. Mama had squandered every good feeling those women had ever mustered for her.

I saw Mama raise her hand to Miss Annie, and Miss Annie raise hers back limply and then turn to one of the other women she was talking to. I saw Mama register this, set back her shoulders, turn, and say, “Home, Libertie. I’m too tired for socializing today.”

She gave up co-conspirators for customers, I wrote to my woman.

“What does it feel like?” I asked Mama one Sunday as we walked back home from church.

She looked at me, startled. “What do you mean?”

What does it feel like to lose your friends? is what I wanted to ask, but I knew it was an impossibly cruel question. So I only said, “What does it feel like to heal someone?”

But this, too, was a mistake, because my mother looked ahead and said, “I’ve never thought about it, Libertie. I don’t know that I can answer.”

How could she?

How could she?

It was the rhythm I walked to all the way to our house, up the steps of our porch to the front door.

I stood in the parlor and watched Mama unpin her bonnet until I could not take it anymore. “How can you treat those white women,” I said, “after what you’ve seen them and their husbands do to the people who came to us? They marked our houses for destruction not three years ago, and you welcome them as if it was nothing. All the blood and sweat you mopped up for years, the bones we set right. All the people we lost—”

“You are so young, Libertie,” she said. It infuriated me. “The world is bigger than you think.” She was still watching her reflection in the parlor mirror.

I tried to meet her eyes, but I couldn’t. I looked at the glass jar with her sister’s braids in it, untouched since Ben Daisy—no one brave enough to touch it since he left us.

No, Mama, I wanted to say. The world can live in the palm of my hand. The world is in the burning between the thighs of the colored women who seek you out for comfort. The world is in the wounds on the heads of the fathers, and in the eyes we treated, burnt by smoke from the fires the white mobs set.

I can measure the world. Can you?

But I didn’t have the courage to say that. I lowered my eyes. For a time.

“I’ve raised you wrong,” Mama said to her reflection. “I’ve raised you all wrong if some white folks being cruel is a surprise to you.”

I felt my face go hot with anger again. “I am not surprised by the cruelty, Mama,” I said. “I am surprised we are expected to ignore it, to never mention it, to swim in it as if it’s the oily, smelly harbor water the boys dive into by the wharves.”

Mama finally took off her bonnet and set it down. She turned to me, her eyes exacting. “You want to write poetry?” she said. “Or do you want to get things done?”

“I want a clean pool to swim in.”

She snorted. “Always with the flowery talk. You’re spoiled.”

“Call me spoiled,” I said. “I won’t rot if I swim in clean water, though.”

She picked up her bonnet and folded it tighter in her hands, her only sign of distress.

She said with a sigh, “You are becoming too old for these scenes, Libertie. You can keep asking me your questions, your accusations full of God knows what. But the answer is never going to change. And I am tired.” She set the bonnet down again, crossed the room as if to leave.

“But I am tired,” I called after her, wanting to make her feel something, wanting to make her react, feel the same slippery sense of unease I’d felt when I saw that our pews were empty and that our friends had left us. “I am very, very tired, Mama. I am tired of bending over women’s stomachs, and I am tired of feeling for babies’ limbs under skin, and I am tired of smelling the sickroom breath of women who won’t even look me in the eye.”

Mama stopped at the door and turned. “If you are tired at sixteen years old, you understand how tired I am of having this argument with you. You can do as you please. But I won’t have this discussion anymore.”

And she left, calling over her shoulder, “Put the kettle on will you? A cup of tea would be nice.”

I sat down in the parlor, in the seat in the corner where I’d watched my mother plan and plot and scheme and heal. Where I’d loved her and wanted only her understanding. I sat there for a long time, as the room darkened around me, as I heard her move about upstairs in her regular ambulations. I had my little book in my lap, full of notes to my woman in the water, but I could not write now. I saw my own handwriting, childish and looping large, and I thought of what she would think if