I wanted to leave the bed again. I wanted to feel the floorboards creak beneath my feet. A line of sweat trickled from under my chin to my chest between my breasts, to the top of my stomach.
I was breathing as hard as if I was racing up the walls of the room. With Mama, sometimes, a woman insisted on laboring with a knife in the bed beside them, to cut the pain. I had thought it silly then, as silly as Mama declaring those moments an emancipation. I had never thought, fully, what it would mean for me to join them there.
“I want Mama.”
“Yes,” Emmanuel said. “Yes.”
By then, Ti Me was there, holding my other elbow. I could feel inside me a great, deep churning. A new world was trying to break out of my body.
It felt as if my hip bones would grind apart. I looked over both their heads to the ceiling and cried up to it. I felt Emmanuel wipe my sweat and tears. My knees began to shake. My spine bore down around itself—I could name every bone as I felt each one break.
I pushed my feet on Emmanuel’s shoulders, a gross inversion of all the times I used to do the same, in pleasure, at night on the boat. And then I heard nothing. Not Emmanuel crying, not Ti Me whispering, not Ella and Bishop Chase’s prayers winding over the ceiling walls.
I heard only the blood rushing in my ears, as pure and steady as a river, and in that one last searing burn of pain, I heard my mother’s voice, wordless, only the tone and timbre that she’d make over our family’s graves.
I felt the heat of my blood between my legs, and when I looked down again, I saw Emmanuel covered in my blood and crying, and Ti Me covered in my blood and smiling, and lying on each of my thighs, my son and my daughter, our children, my children, born into this world I would make for them.
My Dearest Mama,
You have received this letter delivered to you by Louisa and Experience. Know that, as of this writing, I am alive. By the time Louisa and Experience hand this letter to you, I will have delivered your grandchildren.
I do not know what I am or what I will have become by then. I am not sure I ever knew myself. I used to think this was a failing. Something to hide from you. How could I be a righteous woman, to serve the world as you did, if I did not know myself?
But that seems like so little of a concern, now. I may not know myself, but I know the loneliness of love. I know what toll forgiveness takes. I know that the world is too big to be knowable.
I have learned to swim. Emmanuel taught me at first. But I learned how to float myself. The water carries you up, even when you think you are too heavy. When I float like that, I think of you and your ledgers, I think of where you go when you order the world in your mind, and I think I am ever closer to joining you there. I wish you could see your Libertie, floating in cool water so blue it seems God would drink it, staring up at the sky. When you are worried for me, when you are scared for me, when you wish to know me, think of me like that.
Mama, I am coming to you. I will be there maybe even before this letter arrives. When I deliver these children, I will rest for as long as I can and then I will come to you. The Graces have already agreed to help. They have left me their cut of the last leg of this tour, they have left it with a ship captain in Jacmel’s port, and when I am ready, I am to find out when he next sails to New York, and he will harbor me and my children.
I will miss this country. I think it is here, more than anywhere else, that is my home. But I cannot stay. What a horrible thing in this world, to know your home and also know you can never live in it. I will tell you what Emmanuel has done, or rather, what he chooses to continue to have done, when I am home with you again. Emmanuel is a man who I do not think is all bad, but he does not have a big enough imagination to imagine me free beside him. I have already forgiven him for it, though.
I will carry to you my two children. I will wear their swaddling clothes as my own skirts. We will see you again before this world turns in another new direction. We will, at least, turn together.
I learned a new saying here today. Nou bout rive nan jaden an. We have almost reached the garden. My friend Ti Me says it to me as she measures my belly, how far it is dropped, when I am ready for birth. But I think of it as my song to you, my mother, when I see you again.
Love,
Libertie
The boy was at my breast first. He drank, and every time I tried to look in his eyes, he closed them tight. But when I looked away, I felt him watching me. The girl, she did not want my eyes. She watched my mouth. She watched my lips form shapes and my tongue vibrate as I sang to them. I watched her watch the invention of music. Right there, I invented it for her. Being a mother means being someone’s god, if only briefly. This is known, I think. But they are my gods, too. They
