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

When she was gone, I looked at the pileup of my mother’s love.

I’ll burn it all this afternoon, I told myself in a flash of resolve. If I burn her words, I will be free of whatever she wants of me.

Instead, I stuffed the papers back in my drawer.

Of all the things she told me about limbs and wombs and bodies, Mama did not tell me what it felt like to feel life within your own.

Within a month of the time in the graveyard, I felt it. The women in Mama’s care had always described it as a flutter, but this felt more like a determined, persistent churning. As if a current was gathering inside me. The first time I felt it was in the parlor, while Ella lectured. She had been so enamored of her own words she did not see my expression, or note when I left the room. By the end of the month, the wave was steady and predictable. I imagined the child there, as faceless as the skin of the ocean, as formless as a wave.

Emmanuel was afraid I would lose it. He was convinced that what we had wished for, for so long, could be snatched from this world. It was as if all those deaths of his childhood—his mother, his brothers—were around him again and he saw winding sheets and sorrow everywhere. He said it was now too dangerous for me to leave the house, even for church, even for the daily walk to the market.

“I can manage,” I said. “I can help you in your work.”

But he was not convinced. “It is too dangerous. You could lose it. I would not want to lose it.”

“I will be as likely to lose it in this house as I am on the streets.”

“This is the one thing I ask of you, Libertie,” he said. “I have not asked that much.”

And I thought, This is a lie. But he truly does not know it. And I thought, He really has been a kind husband to you, Libertie. He could be crueler. And I thought, again, that I was as gormless as the wave inside me if I could not make sense of any of this.

It was easier, in the end, to acquiesce. I did not think I could live in that house with everyone except for Ti Me angry with me.

“I will stay in, for now,” I said.

And he smiled and kissed the top of my head. “It’s lovely when you’re stubborn,” he said.

For the first week of my confinement, I kept my usual schedule. That is, I sat with Ella in the parlor room and the two of us pretended to work, while the other women—American and Haitian—moved in and out of the house, to Bishop Chase’s study for instruction and approval.

“Emmanuel tells me you are with child?” Ella said the first morning.

“Yes.”

“Well, then,” Ella said. “Your work is done.”

I thought we could reach a kind of peace. That, even in her madness, she would retreat in the face of this.

But Ella was cunning. She began to smother me with nostalgia. Now, alongside talk of the justice and blood she and Emmanuel had witnessed so long ago, she told me story after story of their childhood.

“When we were six, we had a pet goat who disliked me but loved Emmanuel.”

“When we were fifteen, Emmanuel learned to swim and tried to teach me, but I was a lady enough to refuse,” she said pointedly.

“When we were twenty, Emmanuel wished me to marry, but I asked him who was worthy, and he said, ‘No one.’ Just like that, my brother said, ‘No one.’ He has always understood me.”

It seemed such a lonely way to be twins, I thought, Emmanuel always faced out to a future he was sure he could dream into existence, and Ella always turned back to a past that had meaning only for her.

For relief, I sometimes sat in the stoop of the inner courtyard, watching the hens walk across the dirt, watching them eat the dust out of boredom. But even that was not free of Ella. “Emmanuel and I had pet chickens. Two of them. They were black with red speckles, and Emmanuel loved his, but he hated mine, and he tried to pluck her feathers while she was still crowing, and …”

My escape was the cooking shed itself. Ella refused to enter it. “When we were ten, Ti Me told us to never enter it,” she said.

“You are not ten anymore,” I said.

But Ella was adamant. The shed, she was not allowed to enter.

It was quiet in there. The only sound was Ti Me’s feet shuffling across the dirt and occasionally the clank of a spoon on a pot. It was hot, but when it got to be too much, I sat in the doorway and looked back at the main house. By the time I’d found the safety of the shed, my stomach and thighs had grown so much that my knees spread apart when I sat down. A rash of spots had appeared on my skin, and my underarms were always slick. I wore the same tan smock every day while Ella went about sewing me a new dress, with the waist dropped, for my final months. And still I had not heard a word from my mother.

“Have you ever been with child, Ti Me?” I said.

She sucked at her teeth, and I realized I had offended her. I felt a pang of embarrassment. I saw, in the corner of the kitchen hut, the straw pallet where Ti Me slept.

I tried again. “It feels as though my body is not my own. It feels like it belongs to whatever’s growing in there.”

Ti Me shifted a pot from one end of her worktable to the other. And then she began to tell me about the last time she had been ridden by