Libertie Page 3

  “But why?”

  “This is not a game, Libertie. What we did, what we are doing, is very dangerous. If you tell somebody, it would not end well for us. We would go to jail, Mr. Ben would go back to bondage, and you and I would never see each other again. Do you understand?”

  I did not, entirely. But to admit this would not please her, so I nodded.

  She stood up and put her hand on her hip. The sun was finally out, and we could see, in the new light, Lenore coming up the road. Lenore was not a big woman, but she still managed to roll her hips when she walked, and she liked to ball her skirts in her two fists and switch them this way and that, to keep the dust off her. Mama was insistent that no dust be brought into the examination room, except by her patients themselves, and made Lenore wipe herself down with damp cloth and beat her skirt with a straw brush before she could join her each day, so Lenore had devised this method to make it a bit easier.

  She made her way to us, where we stood, glanced at me.

  “The girl up?”

  “I woke up before anyone,” I said proudly.

  Lenore gave Mama a look.

  “I told her,” Mama said. “She says she can keep a secret.”

  “She a child,” Lenore said.

  “I can do it,” I said again.

  Lenore looked steadily at my mother, and my mother looked back for a bit, then lowered her eyes.

  “It’s not safe for the baby to be up,” Lenore said.

  “I’m not a baby,” I insisted.

  Lenore sighed. “Grown folks know when to keep quiet. Babies run they mouths every which way. Y’all can’t help it.” Her voice was drained of malice. She was merely stating a fact. This wounded my pride even more. Worse, she was not even looking at me when she said it; she was looking at Mama.

  “Dr. Sampson, I won’t get sold to a slavecatcher because a child can’t stop talking.”

  “Nobody’s saying that’s going to happen,” Mama said.

  “Still”—Lenore moved past her, to the house, to start the fire burning for the day—“you can’t trust babies with the ways of the world.”

  We were alone together again.

  “I am not a baby, Mama.”

  She looked at me skeptically.

  “I can help. I can do what you do. Let me help.”

  “You cannot, Libertie.”

  “Mama,” I said, “you always say that when I am big, you and I will have a horse and carriage together, with ‘Dr. Sampson and Daughter’ written in gold on the side. You promised me, when I am big. You said that. You did. So let me help you now.”

  She sighed.

  “I am eleven, nearly twelve in July. Let me do it, too, Mama.”

  She was not looking at me anymore, but at the dusty road that Madame Elizabeth had left on and Lenore had returned to us on. “I suppose it was inevitable,” she said.

  “What does ‘inevitable’ mean?”

  “If you’re to join us in this work, Libertie, the first lesson is the one Lenore said. Don’t ask so many questions. Only listen and learn.”

  This lesson did not appear to apply to Mr. Ben.

  The whole day, all he did was question.

  “What’s that you’ve got going there, Miss Doctor?”

  “Lord, why does the house smell like greens gone bad?”

  “Y’all don’t stop at noon to eat?”

  “But I still don’t understand who pays you for all this work, because you know niggers ain’t got no money.”

  Mama tried, politely, to answer his questions at first while Lenore flat-out ignored him from the start. It was not so bad in the morning, before patients, and before John Culver, the pharmacist’s son, came running for more supplies. Usually, in those hours, Mama and Lenore worked in a silent dance, the only sound being the fire crackling and the glass tops of the medicine jars shifting as they reached for this or that to make or measure.

  But the silence of their work seemed to unnerve Mr. Ben, and any time the house began to quiet down, to start the rhythms of women working, he was compelled to speak and break it.

  “Does every woman in New York make a biscuit as dry as this?” he said as he reached for his third one that morning.

  Mama was only half listening.

  “If my woman, Daisy, was still here,” Mr. Ben said, “she’d learn you. Even you, Miss Doctor. Whoever heard of a woman knowing how to make a pill but not a biscuit? It’s not natural. Daisy would learn you, though, if she was still with us. She was sweet like that. She was the type to learn you if you asked.”

  Lenore looked up sharply. “Mr. Ben, you’re bothering the doctor.”

  And Mr. Ben said, “She can nurse and listen at the same time, can’t she?”

  A few moments’ silence. Then.

  “Miss Doctor, this tea is weak,” he said.

  No answer this time from Mama or Lenore, who had pointedly decided to ignore him.

  “Miss Doctor,” he tried again, “why don’t you ever put on new ribbons? My Daisy always tried to make herself pretty, and she wasn’t half as rich or important as you. But she knew how to make herself look nice. If you thought of looking nice, then maybe you’d find a man to come here and live with you. You’re not too old for all that, Miss Doctor.”

  At that point, Lenore moved as if she would show him the door, but Mama held up her hand to stay her. She took a deep breath, and then she turned, a tight smile on her face.

  “Mr. Ben, I do believe you have not seen the rest of our town. Libertie, take Mr. Ben for a walk.”

  “Mama …”

  “You said you wanted to be of service in our work. Well, be of service,” Mama said.

  So I took Mr. Ben’s hand in my own and led him out into the afternoon sun. When I went back for my cloak, I overheard Mama and Lenore.

  “Honestly, it’s a wonder how that Daisy woman got with him in the first place,” Lenore said, and Mama laughed outright. “When will he leave?”

  “His sister will be here soon.”

  “It’s too much, Doctor.”

  “We can bear it,” Mama said.

  I took my coat and left.

  We were the sole house on the way to town—Grandfather had cleared the brush himself and tried to sell the lots along it to other colored men, but most men, if they were buying, wanted to live closer to the school and the church. Because we were the only family on that road, and had the privilege of naming it after ourselves.

  “Sampson Lane,” I told Mr. Ben proudly.

  He nodded. He looked above us, where the tree canopy stretched, through which we could see the white sky of spring.

  “It’s colder up here in New York,” he said. “I didn’t think a place could be colder than Philadelphia, but Kings County has it beat.”

  I did not feel right talking badly about our town, but I also felt my cheeks stinging in the bitter air. I nodded politely, not committing to my guest’s belief but trying to be neighborly, which is what we learned in Sunday school.

  Our house, and the road that led to it, were all on higher ground than the rest of our settlement, and as the path sloped down, as our feet began to angle to the earth, the ground became wetter. My boots were spotted in mud, and Mr. Ben’s began to squelch.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We will tell Mama, and she will find better shoes for you.”

  “She will, will she?” he said.

  “You don’t like Mama,” I said. It had not occurred to me, up until then, that anybody, anyone colored anyways, could dislike my mother. I always saw people speak to her with respect, and even the sick children, who knew to be afraid when they saw a doctor, did not have dislike in their fear, only a kind of awe. So it was a revelation to meet someone who disliked her, and it was so strange that I did not understand it as a threat.

  Mr. Ben did not deny it. He only kept walking until finally he said, “You always been free?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You ain’t never been a slave? Your mama neither?”


  “No,” I said.

  He sighed. “They tell us over and over again what’s not possible. White folks say this ain’t possible, this place ain’t possible. But it’s real. It’s a glory, but it’s … it’s … I wish my Daisy was still here to see it with me. She told me there was places like this. She said if she was ever free, she’d spend all day in silk and she’d paint her face pretty. I wish she was still alive to see it. She knew what she would do with freedom. It wasn’t man’s work she’d do with freedom. Not like your mama. She knew better than that.”

  Then he stopped, and was silent, and seemed to have gone away to another world, too. Not the one where Mama went to figure out how to make a body work right, but somewhere else, probably with his Daisy in her silks. But in the moment, I decided to apply Mama’s new lesson for me and not ask questions.

  “This it?” Mr. Ben said.

  Sampson Lane had reached the crossroads, where the main road stretched to downtown and the waterfront—the journey most people who lived here made every dawn and dusk for their livelihood. In the other direction, the road stretched deeper into Kings County, to the farms some of us worked. The final fork spread south. Around us was some of the land cleared for fields, the cabins and houses built close together so that neighbors could share gardens and animals and conversation.

  There was the schoolhouse, which was empty now, because it was spring and most children were working. It would start up classes again in a few weeks, when they returned, and I would sit there, too, away from Mama.

  There was the low, rambling building that was Mr. Culver’s pharmacy. His son, John, was regularly running from Mama’s to here, passing messages between the two of them. Out front sat six glass vials, filled to the brim with blue and green and red liquid remedies—the sign to all, even those of us who did not know our letters, that Culver’s was a place for medicine. I knew the front room well. Culver’s also was our general store, where we could buy seed and burlap and thread from a welcoming face, not the begrudging white ones downtown who sold the same, at two times the price for colored people.

  And finally, there was the church, the building everyone was proudest of. It had been the first one built, after our grandfathers bought land here, and it stood back, next to a little glen of trees we took turns pruning to keep pretty, and the graveyard shaded lower on the hill, protected from any passerby.

  Mr. Ben looked around. “This it, then?” he repeated.

  “We play over there,” I said, pointing to the other side of the churchyard, where in the summertime a meadow always sprang up, which I and the other children liked to run through. In this new spring, it was bare, but I tried to explain it to him, what the future glory would look like. “We run so hard there you feel like you’re bursting.”

  His face was unmoved.

  “But I guess it’s all just mud now,” I said, trailing off.

  A crow called above us, wheeled in the sky, and settled on the branch of the nearest tree, shaking a too-new blossom loose.

  Mr. Ben said, “I couldn’t see what this place looked like on the way in. I could only hear what this town was like, when I was in that box.”

  “What was it like?” I said. “In there.”

  “Awful, gal. What kind of a question is that? What you think it like, to be shut up in the dark with nothing but yourself all around you?”

  He made another turn, looked up at the sky again, which seemed too white and was closing in around us.

  I was seized with the wild desire for him to love our home as much as I did. He had said he was lonely for his Daisy, but maybe he was lonely because of being in the box, of having been so close to her in death but then being snatched away to rise up. I knew part of making a guest feel comfortable was to introduce them to those they might have something in common with. That is what they taught us girls in deportment at the Sunday school, anyways. And he seemed to enjoy talking about the dead. I pointed to the churchyard again.

  “That’s where my daddy is,” I said. “Mama’s sister, too. They’re dead like your Daisy. Like you were. ’Cept Mama couldn’t bring them back. She did that for you, though.”

  He looked at me from the corner of his eye and smiled slightly. “They all in there, then?” he said.

  “Yeah.” I thought about it for a minute. “Not all of ’em, though. Mama’s sister’s hair, it lives in the glass jar in the parlor. But all of my daddy’s in there.”

  Mr. Ben nodded. He was quiet for a moment, and then he spit in disgust on the ground. “I don’t even know Daisy’s resting place.”

  He limped to the middle of the crossroads, turning first in one direction, then the other. He looked up above him again, at the sky. Then he said, “Let’s go back to your mother’s.” And so we did.

  He allowed me, though, the kindness of slipping my hand in his as we walked back home.

  Dinner was eaten in near silence. Mr. Ben seemed to be thinking still of our trip to town, and Mama, she ate not for pleasure but for utility. She often said that if it was not for Lenore, I would not know good cookery at all. She seemed to notice that there was a sadness around Mr. Ben, because she said, at the end of a meal where the sole talk was between our tin spoons scraping our plates, “Is everything all right, then?”

  He looked up at her, hard, for a minute. So hard Mama startled.

  Then he looked back down at his plate and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  It was my job to clear the table, to take everything to the basin of water Lenore always left, her last duty before the end of the day. So I did not hear how it started between them, only how it ended.

  I had taken our plates and come back for the pitcher when I saw Mr. Ben by the parlor mantelpiece, running his hand along it. Mama was still at the table. She had taken out her accounting ledger for the day. She was back in the world of her mind.

  Mr. Ben ran his fingers along the family Bible that sat there, then over the little mirror in a gold frame that Mama displayed and the bowl where Lenore put cut blossoms from the tulip tree outside. He skipped over the jar with the braids in it. His fingers next ran over a pile of newsprint.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  Mama glanced up over the greasy spectacles on her nose, narrowed her eyes. “Ah, that? That is our newspaper. They print it once a month. It has lots for sale, and news of the church. And here …” Mama got up to stand beside Mr. Ben.

  “I can’t cipher,” he said.

  “Of course,” Mama said. “But, you see, there’s a primer in the back.”

  She rustled the pages to the very end. She held her hand over the paper and read aloud the print there. “See? This part are words to learn. ‘Free.’ ‘Life.’ ‘Live.’ ‘Took.’ ‘Love.’ ‘Loves.’ ‘Man.’ ‘Now.’ ‘Will.’ ‘Thank.’ ‘God.’ ‘Work.’ ‘Hard.’ ‘House.’ ‘Land.’ ‘Made.’ ‘Slaves.’”

  With each word she spoke, I saw him wince, as if the words had pricked his finger.

  “And these,” Mama said, “are the sentences to learn. ‘I am free and well.’ ‘I will love God and thank Him for it.’ ‘And I must work hard and be good and get me a house and lot.’”

  “‘Work hard,’” he said.

  “Yes.”

  It was quiet between them for a bit, only the fire crackling.

  Then Mr. Ben panted out, as if it was taking him great effort to do so, “There was a nigger back in Maryland who learned how to cipher. You wanna know how he learned, Miss Doctor?”

  “How?”

  “He took pot liquor fat and dipped pages of the Bible in ’em. Dipped ’em in till the pages was clear through. Greased the Word and hid it underneath his hat, and that clever, pretty nigger walked around with the Bible fat on his head, and if any white man saw it, he wouldn’t know it as the word of God. He’d only see some greasy, dirty papers on a nigger’s head and leave ’im be.”

  “Well, that’s marvelous,” Mama said gravely. “That’s quite beautiful.”

  “You think?” Mr. Ben su
cked in a gulp of air, cleared his throat loudly. “I always thought it was a whole lot of work. But”—he pointed at the newspaper held between them—“we must work hard and be good even in freedom. That’s what you telling me. With rules like that, don’t it make you wonder what freedom’s for?”

  He let his fingers run along the mantel again, from the Bible, to the mirror, to the flowers and back again, skipping over the newsprint.

  “You got so many pretty things, Miss Doctor,” he said. “Such pretty things. My Daisy was the same way. She kept three stones she’d found: pink ones, and a white one, too. And a shell she’d found down by the wharf. She even had a mirror like this,” he held up the mirror and set it down again. “She wanted one something fierce. ’Course, she didn’t need one. My eyes were enough of a mirror for her, I told her. But she said no, she needed a mirror. To see herself. First thing she bought with the money from her market garden, even before she tried to save for freedom. She loved looking at herself in that thing. Sometimes, I’d have to beg her to put it down so my Daisy would talk to me.”

  He picked up the mirror at last, cradled it in his palm. “Do you think someone like that belongs in freedom?” Mr. Ben said. “I mean, if she’d lived to make it here. Do you think she would have been able to work hard and have her lot of land to earn her freedom, like that paper says?”

  “We all work hard,” Mama said. “I do not follow what you mean, Mr. Ben.”

  “I told you about my Daisy, didn’t I?” He still would not look at her. He carefully set down the mirror. “She was almost as fair as you. No, fairer. And big brown eyes. And hair down her back in curls, when she let it out. Almost like …” He let his fingers run again along the mantelpiece once more, until they lit on the last thing he hadn’t touched. The jar with the braids coiled at the bottom.

  His back was still toward Mama. When he picked up the jar, he didn’t see her flinch. But I did.

  I moved to remind him. “Oh, you know what that is, Mr. Ben,” I began, but Mama shot me a look so pained I stopped my explanation.

  “Her hair was almost like this then,” he said. He held the jar up to better catch the dusty braids in the light.