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

longer than I had Ella. He, too, was resistant, but I sensed that I should not let him go as soon, or this whole scene would be made even more ridiculous. As I held him, I could hear Emmanuel speaking in Kreyòl to Ti Me, who then shrieked—he must have told her I was his wife—and gave a short laugh.

“It is not funny,” I heard Ella scold.

“Sorry, mum,” Ti Me said.

I held on for a few moments more, for good measure, and then I let the bishop go. I stepped back to stand beside Emmanuel and watched his face, warily.

“It is not how I wished it would happen,” Bishop Chase said finally.

“But we are here with you now, Father.”

“Ti Me,” the bishop said, “show them to Emmanuel’s room,” and then he left the foyer.

Ella had composed herself by then.

“Will you show Libertie the house?” Emmanuel asked her.

“We will have four for dinner, not three,” she called to Ti Me.

Ella kissed her brother on the cheek. “We are happy you are here,” she said. And then she left us.

Emmanuel and I still stood in the foyer of the house, which was so dim all I could see of that murky room with high ceilings was a flash of silver from a mirror hung on the farthest wall. All the shutters were closed against the afternoon sun.

To the right of the foyer, I could see a small room—with a table and chair, and a few books stacked on the end of the table—what must have been Bishop Chase’s library. It, too, was dimly lit—its large window opening out onto the street also shuttered. There was a flutter in that room, and I realized that was where Emmanuel’s father must have retreated.

To my left was a staircase, leading to the bedrooms. Directly in front of us was a dining room, its heavy oak table set for a formal dinner with six places, a single silver candelabra in the middle. The windows were unshuttered in the dining room, so that you could look out onto the back courtyard. It was full of a few flowering bushes and some clay pots growing herbs. The ground had been overlaid with stone. At the back of the courtyard was a small shed—the cookhouse, I realized—and farther away from everything, the latrine. Through the window, I saw Ella reappear, stalking toward the cookhouse.

“Come,” Emmanuel said, taking my hand. He led me up the stairs, Ti Me behind us, carrying one of the trunks on her back.

“Oh,” I said when I saw her struggle, and Emmanuel looked over his shoulder, then to me.

“She will carry it,” he said carefully.

Upstairs were five rooms—more than I had expected. But then I remembered the mother and brothers and babies long dead. This house had been built for a much-larger family.

The doors for each room were shut. Our room was the first by the staircase. Its windows, at least, faced the backyard, so the shutters were open and the light was not as dim. There was a single double bed, the mattress dipped in the middle, a mirror, this one smaller than the one downstairs in the foyer, a chest of drawers, with a metal owl and a pitcher standing on it, and a wooden cross, above the bed.

Ti Me letting the trunk fall to the floor with a bang. She looked at me, pointedly, and said, “Ti fi sa a twò cho.” Then she left us.

“What did she say?”

“You have to learn, Libertie.”

“You won’t even tell me this once?”

“She said you are a pretty mistress,” he said.

I sat on the mattress and felt it dip further beneath me. “You and Ella do look a lot alike,” I said.

“She was born three minutes ahead of me, my father tells me, but I’ve been playing catch-up ever since.”

He sat down beside me and put his arms around me. I would have been happy to begin, but as we moved together, I leaned my head back and saw that the walls of the room did not reach the ceiling. The top of the room was open, and if I listened, I could hear Bishop Chase and his daughter and Ti Me talking downstairs, almost as if they were in the room beside us.

“Stop,” I said. I pointed.

Emmanuel looked up. “Ah, all the rooms are like that in this house,” he said. “If the gap was closed, no air could circulate. It keeps the room cool. So that we may do things like this.” And then he pressed himself closer.

To live in a house where we all heard one another—I had not expected this. I thought, again, of my mother, and I wanted to cry. But I did not.

Instead, I pushed him away.

“They are waiting,” I said.

The Chase household seemed to exist in some other country. It was situated not quite in Haiti, not quite in America. Outside the house, the business of the world pulled Emmanuel and his father to different parts of town. Bishop Chase rose early in the morning and refused to take a midday break, even when the rest of Jacmel fell quiet at the hottest part of the day. During that time, he would come back to the house to sit in his office and go over his papers—letters to his diocese back in the United States, to other bishops on other islands, to the deacons and priests in churches he had yet to even see. His progress in building his own church had been quick at first but had slowed in the last few years. The wave of American Negroes he had expected to come and bolster his original outpost, after the war was over, had not arrived. I suspected that they were of the same mind as Lucien, not willing to give up their bets on life in America just yet. But it was the bishop’s belief that they would still come, in time.

I was to learn that Bishop Chase’s favorite subject was how foolish American Negroes were.