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

spend weeks sewing a morning suit for the boy—silk and velvet cut down for a child’s shoulder span. For the girl, a veil and train made comically long, so that she would look even smaller and slighter when she walked to the altar. To act as the reverend, they would ask the child who loved to play the most—one who could ignore his classmates’ tears and keep the gag going with his comical sermon. People paid good money to see them, and to laugh at the children weeping at the altar, unsure if they’d just been yoked to their schoolyard nemesis for life.

This passion for children’s marriages came on us quick after the war. It was a celebration and an act of defiance and a joke—we could marry legally now, even though we knew our marriages were always real, whether the Constitution said it or not. So real a child could know it, too.

Louisa had insisted we add one to our benefit.

“It makes the children cry every time,” I said.

“We’ll sing ‘Ave Maria’ to drown out their tears,” Louisa said.

I looked to Experience, who shrugged. “They get to keep their costumes when it’s over, don’t they? Tears are a small price to pay for a new dress.”

I’d laughed. “You are both hard women.”

But I was not laughing while Louisa and Experience stayed at my mother’s house, preparing their voices for the performance, and I stood in the church, six little girls lined up in front of me, four of them already weeping.

I grabbed the hot hand of the girl closest to me. “That’s Caroline,” Miss Annie called as I pulled the girl out of the church, past the graveyard, to the copse of trees where Ben Daisy used to wait for his love.

Now the little girl Caroline stood before me in tears. “Stay here,” I ordered. I tried to be stern, but this only made her cry harder.

I knelt down and touched her shoulder. “You must know it’s just for play? You won’t really marry anyone. You just have to wear a pretty dress and walk down the aisle.” Then, “Look, look here.” I squeezed her hand once, then dropped it quickly and stepped ten paces away from her, until I was out of the trees, nearly to the graveyard’s gate.

“Watch me, Caroline,” I called. “This is all you have to do.”

And then I counted to myself—one, two, three—and took the exaggerated steps of a march to where Caroline, skeptical, stood in the shade. I held my head up and twisted my face into a grin, which, I realized, probably frightened her more.

“You walk and smile,” I said through clenched teeth. “Walk and smile, and then you get to the front and bow your head and wait, and when everyone claps, it’s over, and we give you sweets and flowers.”

“That is precisely how marriage works,” I heard from the set of trees, and there was Emmanuel Chase.

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly that. Flowers and sweets. So what is the point of carrying on?”

“I don’t want to marry Daniel,” Caroline said. She had stopped crying and was watching us both with interest.

“It’s the same as when you play with your sister or your friends,” I said. “It’s not real.”

“That’s not very kind to Daniel,” Emmanuel said. “His heart will be broken.”

Caroline looked at me uncertainly, her eyes threatening more tears.

“You confuse her for the sake of a joke,” I said.

It had been all well and good to try to flirt with Emmanuel at night, while looking up at my window, my mother a few feet away. But it was less appealing here, in the woods, with only a six-year-old as witness.

Emmanuel Chase knelt down and said with great ceremony, for my benefit, “Listen closely to Miss Libertie.” Then he stood up and smiled at me.

It was strange, to see the way Caroline looked at Emmanuel Chase—it was pure adoration, mixed with a little bit of fear. “Go on,” he said to her, and Caroline closed her eyes and began to march, her knees raised to her chest, her arms stretched out in front of her, lurching toward me where I stood at the edge of the circle of trees.

When she reached me, she opened her eyes, her arms still held out as if she was balancing a great weight, and whispered, in a voice loud enough for him to hear, though she didn’t wish it, “Is the white man still watching us?”

I lightly slapped her arms down. “Dr. Chase is a Negro, just like you,” I said.

She looked at him over her shoulder again, to make sure, which he laughed at.

“Now walk back,” I said, “slower. You do not have to lift your knees as high. March on my clap. And go slow.”

When she reached Emmanuel Chase, he looked at her awkwardly, then reached out, turned her around by the shoulders, and sent her back to me.

So we did this a few times, sending Caroline back and forth between us, sometimes watching each other, until she grew tired. “I know it,” she insisted. “I know it now. Let me be.”

She did her slow, lurching march all the way back to the church, and then Emmanuel and I were alone together. By then, the shadows of the trees had grown long enough to reach me where I stood. I allowed myself to feel the cold for a moment, then stepped back into the sun. He followed.

We stood there, both looking at the church. Today, there were no props for him to play with. He looked almost nervous. It pleased me to imagine that I made him nervous. He raised one hand to his temple and then dropped it just as suddenly.

“I have thought a lot about what you told me,” I said, to break the silence. He looked relieved.

“It really is remarkable,” he said.

“This is where I used to play with Ben Daisy when I was a girl. But still, I don’t know anything about the gods you talked about.”

“Well,” he said, “not