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

to the front and the other end. He made a show of calling me his “dear wife.” He said, “We are to live in Haiti.” I realized that the white men on board were mostly Northerners. It probably had not occurred to them, until that moment, that Emmanuel was colored. A few of them looked at him as if he had played some sort of trick. They, perhaps, had taken me for some sort of concubine. The crew was mostly Negroes—some American, but most from Haiti. They said, “Trè bèl” when they saw me, and tipped their hat if they had one.

There was one other woman on board, a white one, the captain’s daughter. She looked to be my age, maybe a few years younger. She looked straight through me when we passed, made a show of looking straight ahead.

“How much longer is the trip?” I asked Emmanuel.

“We have been on this journey for five days,” he said. “We have eight or nine more.”

Before us, the sea stretched in all directions, the water a deep green. “Do you see there?” he said, leaning in to point, his cheek on mine. “Look over there. Dolphins jumping in the waves.”

It only looked like flashes of light, and I told him so.

“No,” he said. “They’re dolphins.”

“Or maybe they are sirens,” I said “come to lure all these men to their deaths.”

“La Sirèn has a song,” he said solemnly. “They say her home is at the back of the mirror. In the other world.”

He did not move his mouth from my ear. Instead, he chanted into it,

                                             La Sirèn, la balèn,

Chapo m’ tonbe nan lanmè.

                                             M’ t’ap fè yon ti karès ak La Sirèn,

Chapo m’ tonbe nan lanmè.

                                             M’ kouche ak La Sirèn,

                                                    Chapo m’ tonbe nan lanmè.

“What does it mean?”

“You have to guess.”

“I do not know your language well enough yet.”

“And you’ll never learn it with that attitude.”

“Tell me what it means.”

He leaned in close again. He had been waiting for this. I had played the game he wished, without even knowing it. “You’ll learn tonight.”

That night, he told me to lie on my back this time. As he pushed my nightgown down past my shoulders, I covered my face with my hands. He said:

“The mermaid, the whale,

“My hat falls into the sea.

“I caress the mermaid,

“My hat falls into the sea.

“I lie down with the mermaid,

“My hat falls into the sea.”

I saw Ben Daisy’s hat, covered in pansies, held to my mother’s chest. I pressed my fingertips into my eyelids until the image was washed over in an explosion of stars.

“Take your hands from your face, Libertie.”

I did what Emmanuel asked. We stared at each other for a minute, listening to the water move beneath us.

“Take off your shirt,” I said to him finally. He did not break my gaze as he obeyed me.

His skin looked so smooth in the dark. I reached for it, to run my hands along it, and he drew his breath in, sharp, as if I had burnt him. And then he caught my hand in his and firmly placed it back at my side.

“What we do together, the word for it in Kreyòl is ‘kouche.’ It means to make love, but it also means to be born and to die, and to lie down, too.”

“All those things at once?”

“All those things happen when we lie together. You must have felt that.”

I looked at him. I twitched my hips, impatient. “So begin, then.”

“Dogs’ bloodberries.” He reached for my breasts and began to softly touch them.

“What are those?” My voice was faint.

“They are little red berries—peppers, really—that grow at home. Women take them for their wombs—with the plant you have, vervain. It waters them. They become fertile.”

“You are very poetic,” I said. “For a doctor.”

I disobeyed him. I touched the skin on his chest as he knelt above me, until he doubled over himself and shuddered, the wet of him falling across my thighs.

It was strange, to stand with him in the mornings, in daylight, in the middle of the ocean, and act as though what had happened between us at night had not happened. I could see, in the glances of the crew members, in the eyes of the white men on board, that they had guessed what we did at night, had imagined something even more. But here was Emmanuel, walking me carefully up and down the deck, as if he hadn’t wiped his seed on my skin at dawn.

We were four days from landfall when it happened. He had drawn every one of the plants in his knowledge, some of them twice, and the sheets in our cabin were stiff and scratchy with his work.

“There is only one more,” he said, “that I have not told you.”

“What is it?” I said.

By now, when he shuddered, I held him. Sometimes, he pressed his face into my neck. When he touched himself, I allowed myself to look everywhere—his face, his chest, his arm moving ridiculously quickly. Even his member I knew now, like some other specimen to understand. It was still strange, but it had become expected.

“Persimmon,” he said. “They are yellow, and you wait until they are so ripe they are swollen, almost bursting, and when you finally taste them, they taste like the gods.”

And then he did what he had not done before. He pushed my legs apart and bent his head there, and moved his tongue until I was moving my legs apart farther for him, without shame, only urgency. Then he was in me and above me, moving with the same rapidity as he did his own hand, so that it was over quickly enough—the groan again, and then the collapse, though this time I could feel him as he grew softer, soft enough to slip from between my legs.

I had thought, from Mama, that all love was fair. That’s the way Mama practiced it. Love was doling out the right amount of care to each patient and spending the right amount