Libertie Page 19
But I knew, and she knew, this was not true. Because after the boy came down off his ladder, she had him put a rod up on the waiting room ceiling, and then she instructed Lenore to hang a scrap of red velvet on it, to make a little curtain, so that the new patients she admitted, the white women, could pull the curtain shut and avoid the sight of colored women beside them.
The white women came because Mama was colored but not too colored. In fact, her color worked in her favor. She would never be invited to a dinner party, or a lecture, or sit across from them in a private club. They would never run into her in their worlds and be reminded of their most embarrassing ailments: a stubborn and treacherous womb, smelly fluids, bodies insisting on being rude and offensive. Mama could restore these women’s bodies back to what they wished them to be, make them well enough to join this world again—and they would never encounter her in their real lives, this woman who knew exactly what was beneath their skirts.
The first time I touched one of these new white-woman patients, she flinched. I remember, she was only a few years older than me, a young bride who’d come in with thrush between her legs, too embarrassed to see her own doctor and be found out. Found out of what? I wrote to my woman in the water.
I grasped the white woman’s elbow to help her to the examination table, which she did not mind, and then I began to feel at her middle, as Mama had instructed at the start of the appointment, and she batted my hands away. “Off me,” she said. And when Mama looked up, from where she was standing in the corner, preparing for the examination, the woman said, “Your girl is molesting me.”
And Mama, my brave mama, did not come to my aid. She only narrowed her eyes slightly, and then she said, “Come take notes, Libertie,” and she herself went to touch the woman’s middle.
And so I understood. Mama was light enough that the white women did not feel awkward when her hands touched them. Mama, to them, was not all the way black. When the black women they knew outside the hospital touched the white women, they touched them with what they told themselves to be dumb hands. They did not have to imagine those hands as belonging to anyone, least of all someone thinking and feeling. But I’d touched that white woman with a knowing of what was deepest inside her, and she’d recoiled—it was beyond her imagination.
After that, I noticed how the white-woman patients watched me while I assisted Mama. They stared at where my dress tightened on my chest, at the roundness of my arms, at where my skirt darted at my hips—stared openly, because they knew I would not rebuke them—and then they would sigh, exasperated, and look away.
The older ones, I could understand their jealousy—the jealousy of age for youth, I thought it was. Dried up corncobs, I wrote of them in my never-ending letter to the woman in the water. But the patients about my age, I did not understand. I had grown up free, only around colored people, and I could not fathom their scrutiny.
And Mama chose them over me, every time.
When the women flinched, when they scowled at my body, Mama ignored them. Sometimes, she said, “Come stand here, Libertie,” so that I was out of their eyesight. But Mama, dear Mama, my fierce Mama, never told them to stop.
Mama acted as though the white women’s pain was the same as ours. As if when they cried, they grieved for the same things lost that we did. Mama did not seem to mind that a woman who came to our waiting room and sat on the other side of the velvet curtain could not be comfortable. Even when she came at her most vulnerable, when she had to be vigilant for some sort of abuse, she had to stare at that velvet curtain and wonder if on the other side of it was the very white woman who had caused her pain to begin with.
How, when the world was splitting wide open for colored women, could Mama choose to yoke herself to the very white ones who often were trying to sew it all up for us? “There’s prudence and practicality, and then there is a complete failure of imagination,” Miss Annie said shortly after Mama took COLORED off her sign, and that was all any self-respecting member of the LIS allowed themselves to say in front of me.
There was no drawn-out fight. The women in the group did not argue that way. Instead, one Sunday at church, our pew was empty, except for us. No one gathered around Mama’s seat as soon as the sermon was over, as they had when we were plotting. We were back to the same loneliness we’d lived in after Ben Daisy. Mama had squandered every good feeling those women had ever mustered for her.
I saw Mama raise her hand to Miss Annie, and Miss Annie raise hers back limply and then turn to one of the other women she was talking to. I saw Mama register this, set back her shoulders, turn, and say, “Home, Libertie. I’m too tired for socializing today.”
She gave up co-conspirators for customers, I wrote to my woman.
“What does it feel like?” I asked Mama one Sunday as we walked back home from church.
She looked at me, startled. “What do you mean?”
What does it feel like to lose your friends? is what I wanted to ask, but I knew it was an impossibly cruel question. So I only said, “What does it feel like to heal someone?”
But this, too, was a mistake, because my mother looked ahead and said, “I’ve never thought about it, Libertie. I don’t know that I can answer.”
How could she?
How could she?
It was the rhythm I walked to all the way to our house, up the steps of our porch to the front door.
I stood in the parlor and watched Mama unpin her bonnet until I could not take it anymore. “How can you treat those white women,” I said, “after what you’ve seen them and their husbands do to the people who came to us? They marked our houses for destruction not three years ago, and you welcome them as if it was nothing. All the blood and sweat you mopped up for years, the bones we set right. All the people we lost—”
“You are so young, Libertie,” she said. It infuriated me. “The world is bigger than you think.” She was still watching her reflection in the parlor mirror.
I tried to meet her eyes, but I couldn’t. I looked at the glass jar with her sister’s braids in it, untouched since Ben Daisy—no one brave enough to touch it since he left us.
No, Mama, I wanted to say. The world can live in the palm of my hand. The world is in the burning between the thighs of the colored women who seek you out for comfort. The world is in the wounds on the heads of the fathers, and in the eyes we treated, burnt by smoke from the fires the white mobs set.
I can measure the world. Can you?
But I didn’t have the courage to say that. I lowered my eyes. For a time.
“I’ve raised you wrong,” Mama said to her reflection. “I’ve raised you all wrong if some white folks being cruel is a surprise to you.”
I felt my face go hot with anger again. “I am not surprised by the cruelty, Mama,” I said. “I am surprised we are expected to ignore it, to never mention it, to swim in it as if it’s the oily, smelly harbor water the boys dive into by the wharves.”
Mama finally took off her bonnet and set it down. She turned to me, her eyes exacting. “You want to write poetry?” she said. “Or do you want to get things done?”
“I want a clean pool to swim in.”
She snorted. “Always with the flowery talk. You’re spoiled.”
“Call me spoiled,” I said. “I won’t rot if I swim in clean water, though.”
She picked up her bonnet and folded it tighter in her hands, her only sign of distress.
She said with a sigh, “You are becoming too old for these scenes, Libertie. You can keep asking me your questions, your accusations full of God knows what. But the answer is never going to change. And I am tired.” She set the bonnet down again, crossed the room as if to leave.
“But I am tired,” I called after her, wanting to make her feel something, wanting to make her react, feel the same slippery sense of unease I’d felt when I saw that our pews were empty and that our friends had left us. “I am very, very tired, Mama. I am tired of bending over women’s stomachs, and I am tired of feeling for babies’ limbs under skin, and I am tired of smelling the sickroom breath of women who won’t even look me in the eye.”
Mama stopped at the door and turned. “If you are tired at sixteen years old, you understand how tired I am of having this argument with you. You can do as you please. But I won’t have this discussion anymore.”
And she left, calling over her shoulder, “Put the kettle on will you? A cup of tea would be nice.”