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

It was soft and heavy in my hands, the coins inside it spreading over my palms. It was like holding an animal and feeling about on its belly for its organs.

“I suppose,” Ella said, still without looking at me, “that you should hold this now. Since you are now the first lady of the house. The purse and keys are yours.”

Her voice was halting, and strangely high-pitched, as if someone else was forcing the words out of her with a pair of bellows.

“It is not necessary,” I began, thinking that if I could spare her this humiliation, perhaps I could win her favor.

But her eyes flashed at me, and I understood it at once. Don’t you dare pity me. The likes of you could never pity me.

What had Ella herself said? You must be strong, in a place like this?

I took the purse and stepped in front of her and counted out the coins, one by one, to Ti Me’s hand, and when we reached the house, it was I who drew the big iron key from my waist and turned it in the door and let the other women inside.

I thought the keys at my waist would change things. Emmanuel led me to believe it was so. When he saw them there at dinner, his eyes became bright, and later, alone in our room, he held each one in his hand, one by one, only the length of the key between us as he worked them off their ring.

“The keys used to fascinate me as a boy,” he told me. “Ti Me wore them until Ella was old enough, and the sound of them, when Ti Me walked, the sound of their clanking, meant that we were safe. I was scared of this country then. I had not learned to love it yet. I wanted to lock it out all day and all night, and hearing the keys hit Ti Me’s hip made me feel safe.

“I learned,” he said as he let one key fall against my thigh and picked up another, to work off the ring. “I learned, as I learned to love this place, that the keys were an illusion. Why would you live in a place as beautiful as this and lock out the night sky? I promised myself that if they were ever given to me, I would exorcise their power. When we were sixteen and I found out that Ella got the keys because she was now the woman of the house, I was heartbroken. And she would never let me touch them, because she knew I meant to strip them of their power.”

He picked up the last key, began to work it off the ring. “But I have something even sweeter. I have this day, where I see the keys at the waist of my wife,” he said, “and you are mine, and I am yours, and it makes the fact of that even more real to my family.”

He led me to our bed, where he gently pushed my shoulders till I lay on my back, and lifted my skirt. He placed each key, warm from his shaking hand, across my bare stomach, while I whispered that he should stop moaning—his father and sister could clearly hear him.

But his ecstasy over those keys did not keep him close to me. The next morning, Emmanuel left at dawn, as he had taken to doing. He spent his days on an endless round of visits. To his mentor, the one other doctor in town. To his father’s friends and associates—the men who made up the American Negro colony in Jacmel. Sometimes, he came back to the house very late at night, even after his father had eaten and retired to bed.

I was left to spend my days with Ella and Ti Me and the bishop. I say “days,” but it may as well have been the same day, over and over again, so little did it change. Ella was always awake before I was, even if, in the dark, Emmanuel and the rooster crowing outside woke me. She spent her mornings working at her embroidery in the parlor—her incomprehensible jacket. Around ten, she would stow it away in a basket she kept underneath the battered divan, and we would all go to the market.

Ti Me went to the same stalls each day and made the same bargains. I realized on the fourth day, from the rhythm of their voices, that this was not so much an argument but a friendly conversation. Sometimes, Ti Me said something quick and low that made the woman laugh and made Ella blush and sniff about morals. I wished then, more than anything, that I could understand. Always, at the end of it, both women turned to me—Ella sullenly, Ti Me with clear amusement at the awkwardness it was causing her—for the coins in the purse at my side.

We returned to the house for the hottest part of the day. Ella took to her room. She said she could not withstand the heat of the tropics, despite having lived there from childhood. Sometimes, I went upstairs, too, but I grew restless lying beneath the sheet, the shutters closed against the heat, listening to the world outside slow down.

When the world began moving again in the late afternoon, it brought the American women of the colony over to the house. There were about ten of them in total—wives of the men who had followed Bishop Chase, the helpmeets of traders and farmers—all of them with the same pale skin as Ella, not a black one among them. The darkest was a very thin woman with yellow skin and no husband, who taught the Haitian women in a kind of domestic academy.

They would all arrange themselves around Ella, who would lead the conversation, usually begun