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

of time at each bedside. No more, no less. Mama’s love was democratic. But Emmanuel was a despot in his love. He grasped at me—at my legs and my arms and my belly and back—as if, if he held on tight enough, he could claim it all.

Our final nights before we reached Haiti, I told him to be quiet. I looked at his body and saw a psalm. Mama had told me a daughter is like a poem, and so a mate’s body, as made for me as mine was made for him, was like a psalm from God, I thought.

I am black but comely, I sang to him to make him laugh. He did, though he blushed, and it was another point of wonder, that about this my husband could be pious.

“You sing to me the poetry of nature, and I sing to you the poetry of God,” I said to him. Again, he looked shocked, and that was a pleasure, too, maybe the deepest one, after all these nights.

Behold, thou art fair, my love;

                    behold, thou art fair;

                                thou hast doves’ eyes.

Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant:        also our bed is green …

                    A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me;

he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts …

        As the apple tree among the trees of the wood,

        so is my beloved among the sons.

                    I sat down under his shadow with great delight,

                    and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

This is what I sang to him, the word of God all jumbled up, as I held the back of him in my hands, as I tasted his skin and flesh and muscle and bone.

My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my very self, my inside, opened up to him. I rose up to open to my beloved, is what I sang when I saw Emmanuel’s brow at my thigh, his head between my legs, his eyes closed, the only movement the ship and him.

He told me about all the plants discovered by man, and I sang back to him the fruits from God. I panted in his ear, “We are one, we are together, as you promised,” and I did not think of who I belonged to (my mother) before I belonged to him.

I spoke to him God’s poetry while he lay in me, the holy words which seemed to have spoken of us before all creation, all nature, all wrath.

Before I had left, Mama had given me a satchel with five bags of powders she had ground herself. “You do not have to be a slave to him in that way, at least,” she’d said. I had seen enough of her books, copied her columns of writings, to know that she gave this remedy to most of the women who passed through her clinic. The richer ones, she asked for payment; the poorer ones, she did not. And sometimes, a woman had had the course but came to Mama anyways, a few months later, her monthlies stopped and her middle thickening, and then Mama would shut the office door and I would hear the woman sob that Mama was fallible in this.

That would never be me, I thought giddily. My freedom with Emmanuel would come from children. We would build a nation out of each other. That was what we were traveling toward. And our new country needed citizens—babies, so many babies, so many beautiful brown babies, all fat and ready to fill a house.

So I took the medicine she gave me and, one day before we spotted land at Jacmel, I scattered it all over the rail. I told Emmanuel what I was doing, too, and he was delighted.

We were sure that where we were headed, we wouldn’t need it. We were free to be abundant.

Emmanuel had told me, “Jacmel is the most beautiful city in the world.”

It is a difficult thing, to be told something is beautiful by someone who already loves it best. As we approached, he watched my face avidly for my approval, and I tried to look expectant, to look amazed by what I saw. But it looked, at first, like any other town. I smiled and gasped, for his sake, and I did not think it bad, this first falsehood that stood between me, Emmanuel, and this land. I thought it was another sign of love.

The town hugged the base of the mountains—you could see them rolling up, as the ship approached. They were a deep, inviting green, and the buildings that came up to the shore were variations of white and pink and yellow.

We had come only with two trunks—one packed with our clothes, intermingled, the other full of Emmanuel’s supplies: his doctor’s bag, the plant specimens he had managed to collect in New York, and the homeopathic literature he was eager to bring back to Haiti. The rest of what we would need for our life together, he said, would be in his father’s house. Since we did not have many possessions, we hired a man and a mule to take us to Emmanuel’s home, which we reached by steadily climbing the road from the wharves, up through town. We passed the Rue de Commerce, where the traders and businessmen had their shops and then, farther, up the steep city streets, until we got to the quarter where Emmanuel lived, where the wealthiest lived and looked down at the harbor below. All around me, people spoke and called and laughed in a language I did not understand, and it struck me, finally, what I had done. The sun was high above us, my skin was warm and sweating, I was in a heat I did not recognize, climbing a hill a thousand miles away from my mother’s face, and I had not heard her voice for longer than a moment in nearly a year. I could not help it: I began to cry.

“What is the matter?” he asked.

All I could say to him