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

and they had slit her throat and drained her blood and drank it and ate her flesh. The government investigated and brought the bad people to justice. We watched them burn in the capital square. Ti Me, my brother, and I. We saw God’s law that day. It was extraordinary. Emmanuel fainted, and Ti Me kept saying, “It is not right.” She stayed at the square till the last of the embers died down. I think she was waiting for something. I do not know what. My brother was very upset. He said it was a tragedy. That they should never have burnt those terrible people. He still says it was a tragedy. He wrote to me about it, even when he was with you, in New York. So I began to make this for him. To remind him of the true history. I wrote it—see, I stitched it in thread. So he will always remember.”

As she spoke, she’d taken the jacket from me and fanned it over her lap. She ran her fingers over the stitches, again and again, as if she was mesmerizing herself. The thread was red and ragged, from her touching it over and over, and the jacket itself, which had started out white, I think, was a dun gray. It was like a child’s rag doll, pulled apart by the child’s own desire. But Ella treated it like a prize.

I was not sure what to do, until Ti Me came to the door to say “Market.” And then Ella tucked the jacket up and put it underneath the divan, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

Oh, I thought. Oh. I saw now her stiff, irregular hair, her rigid dress. That she should know something of Emmanuel that I did not, even now. That he should hold this in him and only share it with her, and not with me, his wife. That he would not tell me this. I felt furious.

When Emmanuel and I made it back to the water, I was ready.

“I did not think there was anything to tell,” he said. By now, in our lessons, I had learned to wear a pair of old bloomers and one of Emmanuel’s undershirts. He swam in the nude. I had become afraid that someone—a woman coming to wash her laundry in the dusk, a child looking for frogs in the mud—would find us, but Emmanuel seemed to almost relish the thought.

“You would not tell me about seeing those people burn?”

“You can’t … She doesn’t … You cannot always trust what Ella says.”

“She told me she longs to burn heretics at the stake.”

“She took our family lessons in differently.”

“What does that mean?”

“She is different than me. She has been for a long time. I did not want to tell you at first. It is painful, and then I worried you would treat her poorly.”

I was standing in the pool, just at the depth where the water reached my calves. Emmanuel, kneeling in the water, lay back. He said, to the darkening sky above us, “She was not always this way. Papa says she is mad, but I don’t believe it is so.”

I sank down into the water beside him. “I don’t understand why you did not tell me there was something wrong with your sister.”

“We made a pact, when she began to … began to …” I had never seen Emmanuel halt for words, except when we were together in the dark, but he did so now. “When Ella began to … talk like that. Father and I agreed. There is no one here to treat her. They do not have madhouses in Haiti. And I would not put her in one anyways—because she is not mad, I do not think. And if we were to bring her back to America, where would she live? She is best here. She is best at home. I convinced Papa of that. And if I can find something to ease her burden, then I will have done my duty by her.”

“So you expect me to live beside her?”

“She is harmless.”

“She spends all day dreaming of seeing men burn at the stake.”

“She is. She seems to have taken a disliking to you, but she would never outright hurt you.”

“You choose her over me,” I said. “Every time.”

Emmanuel had not stopped looking at the sky. He said now, “I cannot believe you would believe that. When I’ve shown and said so many times to you that you are my life.”

I heard him turn in the water. “Do you want to know what she really is to me? Ti Me says she is like this because our family did not serve us well. The very first words Ti Me said to Ella and me when she saw us were ‘Marasa yo rayisab.’ Twins don’t get along. Especially if they are a boy and a girl. The boy will always prosper, while the girl will suffer. Ti Me is a fatalist, like everybody here. But she believed she could help us a little. She wanted to take us to a houngan, to meet lwa yo, to set it right. Ella refused to do any of it. Even at thirteen, she called it ‘popish magic.’ Ti Me says that that is when we lost her, and that Ella will not return to us as long as she is so stubborn.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Ella has always been like that,” Emmanuel said carefully. “When we were children, she was given to fits of weeping. But then, I was, too. And we had so much to cry over—leaving America and coming here, and being hungry the first year while Father set up his ministry. We thought we hated Father then. And then Ma was gone. And then everyone else.

“Ti Me, when she came to us, she would make sure the colors of our clothes were identical, that our plates always had the same number of yams. Sometimes, if I was in the