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

Libertie

I would go to the barrels of water Madeline Grady kept in her yard and take off the cover and try to catch my reflection in the black-silver surface there. She once found me like this, and I said, by way of explanation, “I am not a good daughter.”

“Well, that’s just pure nonsense if I ever heard it.”

“I don’t think I can be what she wishes me to be,” I said. “I feel too much, and she’s never felt like this at all.”

Madeline Grady fixed me with a hard stare. “I’ve never met a girl as hard-pressed on making life difficult for herself as you, Libertie,” she said. “Usually, it’s men get caught in that current. I always thought women had more sense. But I suppose you live long enough, you see everything.” And she sucked her teeth and looked for her wooden ladle, and I hated her, a little bit, for seeing me so well.

I’d rather have had my mother and her obliviousness. There is a greater comfort in being unseen than being understood and dismissed.

Sometimes, I thought Madeline Grady was wiser than any of us, but Experience and Louisa were not admirers of her. When they found out where I lived, they exchanged a look that I eagerly asked them to explain.

“What? What is it?”

“Well,” Louisa said, “Mr. Grady is a sad man.”

“Why? What’s the matter with him?” I said, alarmed.

“He is very brilliant,” Experience said hesitantly.

“Yes, very learned,” Louisa said.

“And why should that cause you to feel sorry for him?” I said.

They looked at each other, and then they gave me the same pitying look.

“Well, you have seen his wife?”

“Yes, you have seen his wife?”

“Yes,” I said slowly. I did not want to hear all the unkind things I’d thought of Madeline Grady said aloud by these two girls.

But they were subtler than me. “It’s a study of what can happen when you do not let pure romantic love lead you,” Experience said.

“When lust takes over,” Louisa said theatrically.

Then they both laughed. I smiled, as well. I wished, perhaps, they were joking.

“Madeline Grady was a laundress when they met,” Experience said.

“Well, that’s respectable.”

“Yes, but she was not just a laundress. She sold beer and spirits from her home.”

“That’s how her first husband died,” Louisa said. “The father of her two boys. He mistook a barrel of lime for beer one night and drank a whole draught before he realized, and then he died in agony.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“And then, she went to see Grady, to help her claim her husband’s pension, and in a matter of course, the two have their little girl, and are married right before she was delivered.”

“And Grady, the best colored legal mind of his generation is interrupted before he even gets a chance to leave here.”

“She has thrift and grift to support him,” Louisa said. “She’s got the constitution for it.”

“Yes,” Experience said. “Those shoulders.” And they both glanced at my own, as if judging how broad they were, to see if they were as broad as Madeline Grady’s.

“But it really is a study in what can go wrong when a brilliant colored man makes the wrong choice for a wife,” Louisa said.

In the women’s dining room at Cunningham College, there was a big panel of fabric, with green velvet leaves bordering a list stitched out in red thread, three meters high.

MAN IS STRONG—WOMAN, BEAUTIFUL

MAN IS DARING AND CONFIDENT—WOMAN, DEFERENT AND UNASSUMING

MAN IS GREAT IN ACTION—WOMAN, IN SUFFERING

MAN SHINES ABROAD—WOMAN, AT HOME

MAN TALKS TO CONVINCE—WOMAN, TO PERSUADE AND PLEASE

MAN HAS A RUGGED HEART—WOMAN, A SOFT AND TENDER ONE

MAN PREVENTS MISERY—WOMAN, RELIEVES IT

MAN HAS SCIENCE—WOMAN, TASTE

MAN HAS JUDGMENT—WOMAN, SENSIBILITY

MAN IS A BEING OF JUSTICE—WOMAN, AN ANGEL OF MERCY

The first time I read it, I thought, Then what is a man? I thought of my mother, of course, and myself. I tried to parcel out where she lay on the fabric, but she was somewhere in between. Men then, for me, were still too terrifying to contemplate directly. They were an abstract. The only man I had seen up close was Mr. Ben, and he was not described by any of the words on that quilt. The left side of the quilt may as well have been stitched in gold thread; that was how fanciful a man’s character was to me. And I had never known anyone who would claim Mama had taste and not science, who would call her deferent and unassuming.

I regarded that quilt as a kind of private joke, something no one who had eyes could believe. I saw its falseness again when I came home to find Mrs. Grady sitting, skirt spread out in front of her, on the kitchen floor.

“It’s the last of it,” she said, turning out the flour sack. “The school is behind on paying for the laundry, and we’ll be short by next week.”

I flushed. “Mama sent you my share, didn’t she?”

Mrs. Grady nodded. “It’s already spent, girl.”

“But why don’t you tell Mr. Grady? I’m sure he will give you more for the household accounts.”

And at this, Mrs. Grady laughed for a long time, rolling the sack into a tighter and tighter ball as she did so.

“It’s me give him his money. Do you think we’d be eating our dinner under other women’s drawers if Grady had anything for a ‘household account’?” And then she laughed again.

But that night, at dinner, she said nothing, and when Grady looked up from his plate and asked if there was any more tea for that evening, Mrs. Grady just smiled and said she had forgotten it. And then a cloud passed over his face, a recognition, and Grady stood up and went to his study.

The Gradys may have followed the rules of that quilt, but only by a kind of willed fiction between the two of them.

Mama and Madeline Grady and Lenore insisted that men were to be babied and entertained, but not obeyed. The Graces seemed