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

to eat. She was too scared to defy the adults outright, but she spit the food into her hands when they weren’t looking. In the frenzy, I ate double her portion, to help her out.

“ ‘Èske ou te manje ase?’ they kept asking. Have you eaten enough? There were many children, but the kid goat had been fat, the hen, too, and the juice ran down my chin. Every other twin’s face shone with grease in the moonlight.

“All during this, they sang a song. It is the song of the twins,” Emmanuel said. “Should I sing it for you now?”

The only sound was the two of us, shifting slightly in the water.

“Yes,” I said.

He took a deep breath and began.

Mwen kite manman m’ nan peyi

                                                        Gelefre

Marasa elou

                                                Mwen kite fanmi m’ nan peyi Gelefre

M’ pa gen fanmi ki pou pale pou mwen

                                                Marasa elou

Mwen pa gen paran ki pou pale pou mwen

                                                Marasa elou

I walked through the water where Emmanuel still lay, churning up swells with each step. When I reached him, I sank down onto my knees in the cold.

“Do you understand it?” he said.

“I think so.” I closed my eyes and began, haltingly.

“I have left my mother in Africa.

                                        “I have left my family in Africa.

“I have no family to speak for me.

                                “I have no relations to speak for me.”

“Marasa elou,” he said.

I lay back in the water beside him. I began to shiver.

“That’s when I started to believe,” Emmanuel said. “That’s when I understood what this land had for me. Ella is unstable. She has never adjusted to life here. But I have, and I’ve thrived because of what I have taken in. Because of what Ti Me did for us, for me, on that night. That was my introduction to the work, and it is my most cherished act here. Do you understand? Ti Me saved me. The work saved me.”

“You believe it all then? About twins and home and songs,” I said. “And you call your sister mad?”

“Of course I believe it. The new ways here, it’s where the people are free. We cannot be a nation if we don’t have gods in our own image. They made these gods—do you understand? Just as your mother made her place and you made your own. They go further, where we need to. We will never be free until we do as they do.”

“You would believe in magic?”

“I would have us serve the spirits.” He dipped back in the water then, almost gone under, but then I saw he was pulling himself out, to look at me.

“I had thought you would understand,” he said. “I wish my father would understand. I think Ella, in her own way, does understand. It’s why she is so frightened of it all. She knows there’s power there, but she isn’t sure what kind. I believe we will not become a people until we have gods that understand us.”

“You speak in riddles.”

“I have told you from the beginning. This is my ambition. I can bring what I have learned in America and help the people here, with what they already have. I am building a new world. In the new world”—he curled his hand around my wrist, under the water—“we will be equals, you and I. We will be who we wish to be. There will be no limits on what we can dream or what we can do. You believed it when we married, and nothing has changed. Do not let this business with Ella make you think it is not possible.

“I was not forthcoming about Ella, this is true. I worried she would mean you wouldn’t marry me, that you wouldn’t marry into a family with people who were unwell. But everything else I’ve told you about myself should let you know I love you enough to chart new gods for you.”

When we left the rock pool, I was still shivering. Emmanuel walked ahead of me, his back strong and straight, his shirt soaked through. I could just make him out as the night reached up to hold us.

Manman Poul grate, grate jouk li jwenn zo grann li

Mother Hen scratched and scratched till she reached her grandmother’s bones

Libertie,

I was too angry to write again for a long time. I wrote you many letters and burnt each one, because Lenore said they were too harsh.

I am still angry, to think what I have lost and what has been ruined.

This is the life I had imagined for you. That we would have that coach with the gold lettering. That you would carry on my good deeds. That you would be my great act of love in the world and my redemption. My apology to your father for not understanding where he came from. My atonement to our people for failing them over and over and over again, when I couldn’t set them right.

You would be brilliant and set them right. But you are not even right within yourself, I think. And you cannot even understand what I had given you, all I had given you, to prepare you to fight.

They say the Negroes now are a different breed than in my day. The colored people are different. Bolder. And maybe that’s what you are. Not my daughter but a daughter of a different age. Maybe your boldness serves better for these times than my fidelity. Maybe my Libertie is really the clever one, and it is Mama who is the betrayer.

Write to me, Libertie dear, and set your mama straight. Give me your words, please. I cannot take your silence.

Love

Your

Mama

I never wrote her back, because I discovered on Fet Gede that I’d fallen pregnant. That morning, I woke up to the sound of the drums. The drumming was something I had grown used to—it came from the temples that dotted the road to the water basins, and oftentimes, as Emmanuel and I rode back in the dark, we could hear it echo around us, off the trees.

After Emmanuel