Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (top 10 books to read .TXT) 📕

Erzulie. You’re the lover, never the fighter.”

“You are very presumptuous.”

“I know you,” he repeated, still smiling. I wished he would repeat it forever.

I looked away from him, back out to the crowd. My mother still stood with her group of ladies, but she was turned toward us, watching.

“You cannot send notes like you wrote to me this morning,” I said. I knew she couldn’t hear us from where she stood—no one could have—but I dropped my voice anyways.

“I only write the truth.”

“You should understand, I am not as sophisticated as you. I’ve only been from my mother’s garden to her waiting room and back again. The only other place I know is the inside of an anatomy hall. I do not know the world like you do. You won’t find a very satisfying game with me.”

“You think I’m false.”

“I think you are not hearing what I am saying.”

“You’ve mistaken me if you think I only tease you. I wrote it to you, but I’d say it out loud to anyone here who’d ask. I’d say it even without their asking. You wish me to ask your mother now?” he said, and he turned as if to walk toward her.

I knew enough, at least, that in the next beat of the game I was supposed to grab his arm and stop him and laugh. But I stood with my arms at my sides and did nothing.

He turned on his heel and smiled wider. “You called my bluff.”

“I do not understand you,” I said. “You write declarations of love and marriage on the back of a scrap of paper I may not even see, and slip it under my door like an assassin, and then tell me your intentions are pure.”

“So you read it,” he said, “and it’s true. I love and adore you, and wish you would be my wife. And you want to know if my intentions are good. I think that tells me all that I was hoping.”

“I do not like games like this,” I said.

Then I raised my voice to its normal tone. “We are about to begin. Excuse me.”

It is a strange thing, to see something you have imagined over and over again finally acted out in front of you. It is almost like a kind of death, a loss of something, that the thing is not as you had thought it would be. I myself had laid out a path of pine needles, brown and dry in the July heat, from the end of the copse of trees to the stump of the altar. I watched Caroline shuffle down it, almost tripping over the hem of her too-long dress, to the little boy we’d chosen for her groom, who was looking not at Caroline or at the spectators who laughed and called out encouragement, but above him, at a cardinal in a branch of a tree.

When the child minister called out, “You may kiss the bride,” the crowd began to laugh and jeer, but Caroline stepped forward, grasped her boy groom’s head in her hands, and brought his face to hers in a cruel smack, which everyone cheered.

The Graces were to sing in the church, we had decided. But after the wedding was done, Louisa came to me. “We’ll sing here, under the trees, where God and everyone else can hear us.”

So Louisa and Experience stood side by side in front of a crowd of three hundred colored people. They did not look at each other, but before they began, Experience grabbed Louisa’s hand and held it, and did not let go until the songs were over.

The sound they made, with just their two voices marrying in the air, filled the whole clearing.

My Lord,

                what a morning

My Lord,

                what a morning

Oh, my Lord,

                what a morning

When

                the

                            stars

                be gin

                            to

                                    fall

You’ll hear the trumpet sound

                To wake the nations underground

Looking to my God’s right hand

                        When the stars

                        be gin

                                    to

                                    fall

You’ll hear the sinner moan

                        To wake the nations underground

Looking to my God’s right hand

                        When the stars

                                    be gin

                                            to

                                                fall

You’ll hear the Christian shout

                        To wake the nations underground

Looking to my God’s right hand

                                When the stars

                                    be gin

                                            to

                                                fall

You read in the Bible about the voice of God shaking leaves and commanding bushes to burst into flame, about trumpets making walls fall, about the songs that can sweep waves across the planet’s face, but it is quite a different thing to stand in the heat of July, the smell of damp lace and pine sap and other people’s bodies all around you, and know those words to be true.

By the time they got to “What Ya Gonna Do When Ya Lamp Burn Down,” the crowd joined in—men, women, and children, singing and slapping hands and the bark of the trees—Experience and Louisa in the middle, still hand in hand, their voices rising above it all. I think it is the closest I have ever come in my life to seeing true love, and for a moment my sadness and anger were gone. I only felt the warmth of something fulfilled, and I closed my eyes to make it stop, because it felt too much.

The rest of the afternoon was the bazaar and the feast—long tables brought out and set with cake. Plates of oysters, too, which Experience and Louisa had never seen before.

“You tip them back, like this.” I showed them, and when I held one up to Louisa’s lips, she began to giggle. “That smell!” she cried. Experience pinched her elbow and then blushed hard, and they would not tell me anymore what it was about, so I drifted away from them, alone again.

Emmanuel Chase kept his distance from me, walking among the crowd, talking to the prettiest women and girls, laughing with the men. I thought, Had we really stood under those trees and talked of marriage? I could not believe, would not have believed it, to look at him.

“You are in-fat-u-a-ted.” It was Lucien who sang this. There was a slight weave in his step as he moved toward me, slapping the rhythm on his thigh. When he reached me,