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

and I flushed warm, because Mama did not often comment on anyone’s appearance, unless it was to note that their skin had gone jaundiced or developed a rash.

“It’s a shame she got her father’s color,” Madame Elizabeth said absently, and Mama stopped smiling.

“It’s a blessing,” she said, very distinctly, and Madame Elizabeth’s hand paused.

“You aren’t scared?” she said. She was stroking my face again. I did not want her to stop, but I could see from Mama’s face that she wished that she would. “This work grows more dangerous, you know. You are all right. You’re bright enough they hassle you less, maybe. But she’s too dark.”

Mama stood up abruptly. “It’s less dangerous work if your helpmeets come to you at midnight, as promised, not dusk,” she said. She bent over Mr. Ben’s cot.

Madame Elizabeth let go of my face.

“I told you why we missed our time.”

But Mama didn’t answer. She held her palm over Mr. Ben’s open mouth.

“How is he?” Madame Elizabeth called.

“If he makes it through the next hour without any upset, he should be recovered.”

Madame Elizabeth looked over at her son, who had fallen asleep in Mama’s leather examination chair. Lucien, like Madame Elizabeth, had brassy velvet skin, and it was blushing now, in the last heat of the fire.

“Lucien’s good-looking as well.” Madame Elizabeth glanced sideways at Mama. “Perhaps one day, he and Libertie will make us proud and marry.”

Mama was still watching Mr. Ben, but she smiled. “And move my Libertie all the way to Philadelphia, away from me? I couldn’t bear that,” she said. But she was pleased, I could see, that Madame Elizabeth, even in jest, considered me worthy of her son.

“What did Mama do with the purple ribbons?” I asked before I could stop. I cursed myself. Surely, now they would send me to bed. But Madame Elizabeth pulled me onto her lap.

“She wore them every day, because she knew they looked so fine. She was wearing them the day she met your good and kind father. She only let me borrow them once, when I asked her because I was going to a lecture at the lyceum. And, wouldn’t you know, it was there where I met my own good man, Monsieur Pierre. He was fresh from Haiti, and I do believe meeting him is because of those lucky purple ribbons. Maybe she’ll let you wear them one day, too, and you will tell us of finding your love with them.”

“Tall tales,” Mama said.

The rope on the cot whinnied as Mr. Ben turned over in his sleep. He began to cry. He was saying something, a word gargled by the bend of his neck. Mama gently lifted his head, and he sighed. Then he shouted, “Daisy.”

“He certainly is giving us work,” Madame Elizabeth said.

“We grow too bold. You should not have taken him.”

“He insisted. In his state, it’s safer to keep him moving. Once his sister comes, she can take him on to Troy or Syracuse. Or Canada.”

“He won’t be safe till he’s out of this country. Even then, he will probably still be in danger,” Mama said.

“Daisy,” Mr. Ben cried again.

“His sister said that was his girl,” Madame Elizabeth said. “He took up with her, and then she ran. They got word last spring she died. That’s what finally made him despair enough to leave, his sister said. She’d been trying to get him to work up the courage for forever. Their mother gone, brother gone, and then the girl he’d started to love, for just a little bit of comfort, gone, too. That’s why he’s here.”

“He’s running away, not running towards. They’re the most dangerous kind,” Mama said. “They have nothing to lose, and so they grow reckless.”

“He won’t harm us, though.”

“Let us hope,” Mama said. She did not sound convinced.

My mother named me Libertie for a dead man’s dream, the dream of my father—the only other dead man I knew before Mama resurrected Mr. Ben.

My father died when I was still in Mama’s womb. He was a traveling preacher, and on one of his trips west, he fell ill. By the time he made it back to her, it was too late. Even Mama, who I believed could heal everyone, could not heal him. In his final moments, as he lay sweating his life away in her arms, he told her to name me Libertie, in honor of the bright, shining future he was sure was coming.

Father was one of those who’d stolen themselves away and come up north. Did he come in one of Madame Elizabeth’s coffins? I do not know. Mama did not like to talk about him. His name was Robert. I know it only from tracing it on his gravestone with my finger. He is buried in my mother’s family’s plot—he, of course, did not have his people up here. His gravestone reads robert sampson, and then, underneath it, instead of his time on this Earth, only one word: freedom.

Although Mama did not like to talk about my father, she did like me to take care of his grave. Every other Sunday, after church, we stopped in the burial place and washed down his stone and pulled up the weeds. One of the first presents she made me, when I was four or five, was a small pair of scissors to wear at my waist, so that I could trim the grass that grew over him. “It’s his home now,” was how she’d explained it to me. “We have to make it comfortable for him.”

While Father was the one dead man I knew, I knew of a dead little girl, too: my mama’s sister. She was also buried in the family plot, but her stone had no name, and Mama wouldn’t tell it to me. Mama did not like to speak of her, either. She was not a name, not a memory—just a white stone that only Mama was allowed to tend and a glass jar on the parlor’s mantelpiece, where Mama kept