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

I felt the grass, insistent, on the bottom of my shoes. I felt the calm cold of the night air. “There was a man my mother tried to help. Madame Elizabeth tried to help him, too. He was a funny sort of man—he stole away here before the war. But he couldn’t abide freedom. It was almost as if he couldn’t understand it. That sounds wrong, but that’s how he acted. He said his sweetheart, who had long died, was here with him, that she wore pink and white and loved sweet cakes and that he only wanted to be with her. He became upset when he caught her with three wedding rings on her finger, so he claimed, and he drowned himself in the river. All because he was sick with love and freedom.”

Even as I said it, I felt a roll in my stomach. I had never given Ben Daisy’s history like that to anyone so plain. To do so felt like a betrayal of Mama, and I half expected her to throw open the house’s front door and stare me down. But the door stayed shut.

“Ah,” Emmanuel said. “That was not La Sirèn. That was Erzulie Freda. She is the goddess of love, and she is married to the god of the sky, the god of the ocean, and the god of iron. She loves hard and loves beautifully, but she is never satisfied. She ends every day crying for what she has not done, what she cannot have. Your poor man had no chance against her.”

He hadn’t heard me, I thought. Or he thought my story was part of our dance. Or maybe what I had said about Mr. Ben was too monstrous. Imagine telling a revolutionary like him that freedom made a man sick. I felt a burn of shame at my perversity. I wanted to be better for him. So I did not say, “You misunderstood.” Instead, I said, “I suppose you are correct.”

The window was still illuminated. As I remembered Ben Daisy, the song I had made up for him came back to me, as loud as the flies drowsing in Mama’s garden.

When I looked back at Emmanuel, I saw he was watching me, in the light of the moon, with those wide-set, watery eyes. He was still sucking on the end of the cigar.

“Why haven’t you lit it yet?”

“You have to taste it first, before you can light it. I brought ten of them from home, and have been trying to ration them.” Then, still looking at me with interest, he said, “I save them for special occasions.”

I thought, with a flash, of how he had watched my face as he gave his speech at dinner, that silly remark about the moon.

“There is nothing special about tonight,” I said, despite knowing what he meant.

“But there is,” he said. “It is very rare that I can meet a devotee of Erzulie herself, this far north, near the waters of a river as cold and muddy as one in Kings County.”

“So I am a goddess of love, then.”

“If you insist,” he said.

It was a game I was no longer sure how to play. To be earnest seemed wrong. I thought of Mrs. Grady’s hectoring. I was not quite up to that, either. Louisa and Experience, they were true with each other. Quick, Libertie, quick, I told myself. Something clever. But all I could say was, “Why are you interested, then?”

“My father thinks the Haitian gods are demons. He thinks it is his life mission to get every Haitian to Christ and to forget the blasphemies. But I think those gods are our genius. The genius of the Negro people. Our best invention. And Erzulie, the goddess of love, she’s called with honey and flowers and sweet things, and she speaks to the longing, the desire for perfection in this world, and our sorrow that we will never achieve it. And I try to stay close to people who know her.”

“But none of it is real,” I said. “It was a thing Ben Daisy made up when he couldn’t stand to be here. And I was just a child. That’s why I believed him.”

Emmanuel Chase finally struck a match and lit his cigar, and the heavy smoke rolled over both of us. “It was real enough to drown the man. I think it is remarkable.”

It was my turn to speak, my turn to say something fascinating to him, but I could think of nothing. My bedroom window was dark now.

I only pointed up above, at the moon, just a sliver of white behind a black ribbon of clouds. He followed my gaze. He breathed heavily, and another gust of too-sweet smoke came over us.

“Good night,” I said.

“Good night, then, Libertie.”

Upstairs, at the entrance to my own room, I stood at the door for a minute, my hand on the knob, afraid it wouldn’t turn. But it did, easily enough, and in the dark I could just make out the two rounded forms of the Graces, on opposite sides of the bed, a clear space between them.

I crawled into the space. Louisa turned and breathed in, then coughed.

“You smell like a bad man,” she murmured.

Experience sneezed.

“It was Dr. Chase’s cigar,” I said, even though I knew she spoke in her sleep. “He smokes in the garden at night. Cigars he has to work up to taste.”

“Hmm,” Louisa said. Then she turned on her back, away from me. Experience turned in the other direction.

For a long time, I lay between my two friends’ love, my eyes open in the dark, breathing in the smell of the night curdled with the stink of cigar through the open window, where Emmanuel Chase, I guessed, still stood below, smoking at the moon.

In those days, in Brooklyn, Tom Thumb weddings were all the rage.

The prettiest boy and the most docile girl of any Sunday school class would be chosen as the groom and bride. Churchwomen would