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

her influence off me like dust from the road. But everything in that place she’d banished me to looked to me exactly like Mama. The gray sky that arched above me was the same color as her front tooth, and the fields smelled like the inside of her shawl, and the wind in the trees, I thought, sounded just like the whisper of her voice when she was being urgent.

The cart stopped a quarter of a mile before it reached campus, in front of a wide, low log cabin, set back a little, with a short, rough-hewn fence in the front.

As I headed up the path in the dusk, my trunk trailing behind me, the door opened. A woman stood there. When I reached her, I realized she was shorter than me—the top of her kerchief only came up to my shoulder. She was almost as dark as me, too. She looked up at me, laughed at my dirt-smeared face. “You look like you walked here from Brooklyn,” she said.

She came out behind me and pushed me inside. “Leave the trunk,” she said. “One of the boys will get it.”

This was where I was to board—the home of an old friend of Mama’s, Franklin Grady. He was from Kings County, too, and had moved out west to study law at Cunningham College, run for over twenty years by abolitionists, an experiment in Negro education. The woman who greeted me was Grady’s wife, Madeline.

Grady had been there since before the war, since the days of spiriting away, and now that war was over and there were so many ways for a Negro to get ahead, he had chosen to stay at the college, to become its first Negro dean of law. Indeed, as Mama had told me, all the teachers were Negroes—drawn out to these fields to grow the teachers and doctors and farmers and lawyers our race would need in freedom.

I realized that Mama had sent me to a place that was the antithesis of her hospital. There would be no white students behind a velvet curtain in the classrooms of Cunningham College, claiming reconciliation. But Mama also knew, as did I, that I couldn’t get away with the trick she’d pulled so many years ago—register at a white medical school and be taken for merely a white woman, not a colored one, until first semester marks came through.

The Grady household was not like mine. There were three rooms—the big front one, with the hearth, the back room, where Grady, Madeline, and the three children slept, and then a smaller room, where Mr. Grady’s books were kept and where he went to work on the cases that came his way. The main room was hot. Hanging from the ceiling, draped over every beam and surface, were skirts and shirts and pants. Enough clothing for a regiment. “Keep looking,” Madeline Grady said as I craned my neck up to stare at the ceiling beams through the leg hole of a pair of bloomers. “They’ll be here till Wednesday.”

Then she moved off, out the door to the yard, where more clothing hung out to dry.

She did not ask me to follow her, and I was at a loss as to what to do, so I sat down on my trunk and waited, while the two boys who were supposed to help me drag it in stood in front of me and stared. “Hello,” I said, and they both ran off with a start to hold on to their mother.

Mrs. Grady came back in to the room and began to pull down some of the skirts and shirts and throw them over her arm. I moved to help, but she held up her hand. “There’ll be time enough for that once you’re properly settled in. Sit still. Play at being a lady,” she said, and then laughed again.

I stayed on the trunk, awkwardly. When she came back in again, she pushed one of the boys forward, who held out a branch he’d broken off from the oak tree out front.

“Well, take it, then. Beat the dust out you, at least,” Mrs. Grady said.

When Grady came home, that’s what I was doing—hitting my knees and ankles until the dust from the road danced in the air. I was the only one to greet him, because Mrs. Grady and the boys were back outside, wringing the last of the gray water out of strangers’ shirts.

Grady blinked at me once, twice. His cheeks flushed pink in the heat of the room—he was, perhaps, a little bit darker than Mama, and much, much lighter than his wife. But he was also clearly a Negro—he would not have been able to get by. He was short, too, with a round, pleasant face decorated with freckles and a broad, friendly nose, across the bridge of which perched the same small spectacles that Mama always wore.

When he saw me, though, he frowned as if I was a misplaced book.

“That’s the girl, Libertie,” Mrs. Grady called from the yard, and Grady grunted in response.

Later, at dinner, I told him, “Mama says thank you for your hospitality, and I do, as well,” but he only managed to mumble a reply into his soup.

“She’s asked me to give you this,” I said, and I handed him the small pamphlet on prayer by Reverend Harland that our church had commissioned to be printed to celebrate the end of the war.

“Well, go on. Thank her,” Mrs. Grady said. Let your own pickaninnies learn good grace.” That made him smile, slightly.

He glanced at the title, then read it aloud. the glory of tomorrow it said in proud, correct letters.

“Mama doesn’t like that,” I said. “She says it assumes too much.”

“Huh,” Grady said. “Well, Cathy never did put too much stock in forecasting.”

“I, for one, agree with her on that,” Mrs. Grady said to her bowl of soup.

“But you know Reverend Harland,” I said. “He just refuses to respond to any of Mama’s hints about unseemliness.”

I blushed