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

When your father died, I spent three weeks in bed. Nearly in bed. I was alone in the house—my own father had passed a year before. Reverend Harland came to see me only once. But when he came, I was sitting up in bed, my mouth open wide in a scream with no sound coming out. I scared him in my grief. The Reverend has never been a brave man. The only other person to come see me was Lenore, who came every few days to hold her hand over my open mouth, to make sure I was still breathing, and to bring biscuits, hard as stone, from some of the women at church.

I spoke to no one except you. I placed both hands on my stomach, and in the quiet of the house I cried to you about your father. How much I missed him. You’d quickened before he passed. I’d held his hand myself over you, where you tossed inside me and rippled the skin on my stomach like a wave.

So after he was gone, I lay in bed and watched you move inside me, even though I wished the whole world had stopped. In that house made still by death, I knew you would continue, at least. At least I would have Libertie.

Elizabeth would write to me of her great political awakening. I liked those letters because they burnt with the same passion your father had, for the world to be set right. Elizabeth was learning so much then—about how slaves really lived, about what our own lives would be like if we had not been born free. I am ashamed to say I had not thought of it before. Even with your father whispering revolution in my ear, I only thought of colored people as the most cursed race in the world. I thought we were merely unlucky. I thought it was a matter of luck. I had read the stories of daring escapes, heard the old ones speak, seen the haunted eyes of our newcomers, and was only glad it wasn’t me.

Your father did not talk of his life before he was free. He would not tell me even what town he ran from, only that he had lived for a spell in Maryland, and for some time in Virginia. Who his people were—his mother, his father, his sisters and brothers—he would not tell me, and in the flush of love I did not press him. I saw how asking made his eyes sad. Besides, I told myself, our life together shared a different fate. He had found me, with my bright skin and farm and money and profession, and he would be safe always, because I loved him. That’s how young I was then. I really believed that.

After your father died, Elizabeth’s letters told me of the women who came to her, the front of their dresses wet with milk, their daughters snatched from their hands, and I feared that would be me. It would be me. You would be taken from me, and it did not matter that I was freeborn, and it did not matter that I could see the blue veins at my wrist. None of that would keep you safe. That’s what drove me to give aid. And I decided when you were born that I would hide my heart from you, because I worried I would love you into nervous oblivion.

When you were born, when Lenore raised you up from where she’d placed you on my thigh, the first thing I did was check behind your ears for your true color. And I rejoiced for what I saw there. Because a part of him would live on in the world. That beautiful color. His skin glowed in the sun, like yours did as a girl, as it does now. I could not look at you in your wedding dress—that black black skin against that field of white—because of the glow of it. I had to turn away, you were so overpoweringly beautiful.

When I saw the color behind your ears, I could no longer deny all the ways you could be taken from me.

Even I was not secure, and my papa was not secure, in our color, because we were known to be colored and we could have been taken at any time. And if you were taken from me, no white person would believe you were mine—they did not think it was possible that I would prefer your black skin to my faint yellow, that I could give birth to something as wondrous as you.

The whole world told me you weren’t mine, whenever I held you in my arms outside of our home. And so I grew frightened for you. And I knew what I owed you was very great. I must raise you up to be strong enough for this world. I must teach you how to heal the people in it. Maybe that could save you, I thought. Again, I was still very young then.

You would not believe me now, but you were a happy baby. Your joy brought something back for me. You will see, when you have your own children—it is as if they are your new eyes and your new heart, and you feel sometimes you can live for a hundred years more, even after all the trouble you’ve seen. You actually want to live for a hundred years more, even knowing how cruel the world is.

Before you came, I stayed in this world out of a sense of duty only. It was my trust to fix it. I would get weary sometimes. I would think of what your father wanted—Liberia. I would think of what would happen if I had followed his desire to be there. Only a heavy sense of duty screwed my ankles down into Kings Country