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

told me his life’s work, I tried to do my best to make it my own. I had thought it was all poetry—though better poetry than what I’d written for Mama or the woman in the water, because it was inspired by love for me. But it wasn’t just poetry; it was the logic by which he governed his actions and his mind, and I told myself I must learn it if I belonged to him now.

I thought that it explained the long silences between him and his father. I looked at Ella and tried to see her with the compassion that Emmanuel did. Her heat-stiffened hair, her sweaty, pale skin, the way she looked with fear and anger at the women in the market. Love her. Love her. Love her for it, I told myself. But mercy is hard to cultivate, when it’s for a stranger who tells you you’re only as good as what’s between your legs and ignores you for hours on end.

Emmanuel must become your religion, I told myself. Submit to him as you would to any preacher. It is the only way to survive here. He is your helpmeet and your ally.

During the day, I did well enough. I sat near Ti Me in the cookhouse and tried hard to learn the language, enough so that one day I could ask her about the gods she and Emmanuel loved.

But every night, I betrayed him, when I dreamt of being with my mother.

Sometimes, I dreamt I was a girl, working quietly and companionably with her in her study, the heavy smell of camphor around us. Sometimes, I dreamt I was finally driving the black carriage with dr. sampson and daughter drawn in gold on the side. In every dream, Emmanuel, marriage, my desire for him, was forgotten, nowhere to be found. When I woke, I would long for her again, even as Emmanuel’s arm sat heavy across my breast, even as I felt the long naked length of him against my back.

Sometimes, in the dreams, she held me in the softness of her lap, as if I was a child, and swept a gold fan over us.

The drumming that had started all around us that October, that startled me from morning sleep and afternoon rests, was a relief. It shook my head free of grief, and to its rhythm I could sing Love Emmanuel, and so forget my mother.

“The idolatrous Haitians worship the dead,” Ella spat to me, the walls of the sitting room, the sewing in her lap, whenever she heard the drums. Emmanuel had told me that, yes, the dead here held a special place. But what do you call it when you worship a memory of a living person, of one who has never been completely known to you, and when your worship is unwilling, driven not by a desire to honor but because you have realized the world didn’t make sense with her, and does not make sense now that you are without her?

“Fet Gede is their All Souls’ Day, but as with everything outside of America, the sense of humor here is keener,” Emmanuel had told me in bed the night before the holiday. This was his favorite position to tell me stories—while lying down.

“Ella tells me that the men tie skeleton hands to their belts and circle their hips in lewdness,” I said.

“In that, she is not wrong. If there was ever a holy day designed to speak to Ella’s delusions, this is it.”

Already in the night, we could hear music and laughing, louder than usual.

“It is one big celebration for the spirits of those who passed,” Emmanuel said.

“It sounds macabre.”

“It is not.”

“If I went with you, I could see for myself if it is not.”

“But then who would keep the peace with Ella and father?”

In the morning, my bed was empty.

Emmanuel had told me that he would spend Fet Gede with the houngan he was apprenticed to, a leader of a Vodoun house of worship that Ti Me had introduced him to—the very same man who had presided over his own feast of Marasa in the woods, long ago. He no longer hid the purpose of his trips from me.

The other Chases were planning to spend the day in public prayer—a pointed protest of the merriment all around them. I had already missed a chance to see how our neighbors on our street would prepare, because Emmanuel had deemed it more prudent for me to help the women clean the church and wash down the pews in preparation.

“I do not see why I cannot come with you,” I’d said.

“They are already skeptical of my work,” Emmanuel replied. “Your being here at least lets them see that I can be something of a family man. That my project does not exile me from any sort of decent life, which they would very much like to believe. If I were to do this work as a bachelor, they would claim I’d let my brain go foggy through lack of domestic love. If you outwardly assisted, they would claim that I was a corrupting influence on you.

“This way, they cannot discredit my work. Not if my own wife is at the front row of the choir, singing hosanna with everyone else.”

“You have thought of everything,” I said.

“The work is too important not to.” He’d taken it as a compliment.

I took coffee with Bishop Chase and Ella, then waited as Ella went through her three shawls, deciding which one she should wear to service.

“The yellow one, I think,” I said, hoping to goad her.

It worked. She quickly chose her black shawl and gave me a sly look, as if she had been triumphant. I was learning how to manage her, at least, I thought.

I walked with her to service, Ti Me beside us. Ella made a show of covering her ears whenever the drums seemed too close. In church, she threw herself down on her knees before the service even began, and shut