Lucien said, “You have not enough faith in colored people.”

“Do you know a story my father used to tell me?” Emmanuel said. “He used to work with a white family just past Baltimore. He would send people their way, when they were escaping. But he had to stop when one of them told them what the white people were doing—inviting slave owners over for dinner and then asking everyone to debate the slave question, together, at the table. Black men, scared and tired and just trying to run, forced to sit and prove how worthy they were to the very men who should have been apologizing to them—”

“Emmanuel,” Mama said. If it had been me getting angry, Mama would have stopped the whole conversation. She would have tried to drown my rage. But here was only a very quiet “Emmanuel,” which he ignored.

“You can’t ever be free in a place like that,” he said. “In a house that runs by those rules. I can tell you, no one in Haiti has ever asked for such an indignity. It is our own republic. It’s for colored men such as us.”

“But they are not Christians,” Experience said. “They are papists.”

“And cannibals,” Lucien said.

Emmanuel looked pained, as if Lucien had reached across the table and slapped him. “Your father would let you speak of his country like that?”

“He is who told me this of his country!” Lucien said. “Colored people are a cursed lot, but at least in our good fortune, we are cursed in the good Christian nation of America, where good government and understanding of God prevail—”

“You say that as they riot any time we try to sit in a railway car,” Emmanuel said.

“Those are only potholes on the road to progress. We will prevail. We have the tradition of good Anglo-Saxon law and fairness to guide us. Haiti has none of that. We could go there, I suppose, to raise them up—now, I agree with you on that. As good Christian Negroes, we should act as a mother to our race, to bring it up to manhood.”

“But there’s still so much to be done here,” Mama said.

Emmanuel had that pained look again, the one that had creased his face when Lucien called his countrymen cannibals. It momentarily flashed across his face, and then it was gone, suppressed. He looked at Mama with polite interest, though I was beginning to think that underneath, he was burning the same way I did.

He turned back to Lucien. “None of us will ever triumph,” he said, “until we are completely free.” Emmanuel may have sat at the head of the table, but he would not have dared to say this directly to Mama.

“But what does freedom mean?” I said. I could not help myself. I had heard something in his voice then that I thought—that I believed, that I flattered myself, that I hoped—was only for me.

The table stopped to look at me. My mother, I saw, looked the hardest. It was as if she was seeing me for the first time. But all I could think was, I have embarrassed her again. She wishes I was not her daughter, that clever Emmanuel was her son.

I closed my eyes, wishing I had not spoken.

“It means,” Emmanuel said, his voice shaking, either from excitement or dread, I could not tell yet, “that we are wholly in charge of our own destiny.”

“And we seize it, apparently, with violence and blood,” Lucien said, “if we are to follow the Haitian model. That does not sound like freedom to me. Freedom goes hand in hand with peace and harmony and prosperity. But did you ever notice”—he leaned over to Louisa—“how the lightest ones burn brightest for revolution? Why is that?”

“They’re closest to freedom and can taste it, so they’ll do anything for it,” Louisa said, laughing. She had begun to relax and regain her playfulness.

Emmanuel Chase laughed along, but he wouldn’t look at her. He only said to Lucien, “Revolution already happened there.”

“Here, too. Twice,” Lucien replied. “It’s hard work, but we’ll prevail. Colored men will be free. And in the meantime, I don’t have to speak French.”

“It would give your father great pleasure if you did,” Madame Elizabeth said.

Lucien slapped his hand on the table. “Mwen se yon American.”

“I did not know you were such a patriot,” Louisa said.

“Oh, but I am.” Lucien leaned back in his chair and began to sing the first few verses of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” in the nasal tones of a northerner. “Please join me,” he said.

Louisa scoffed. “I have a voice to preserve,” she said, which made the whole table laugh, except for Emmanuel, who sat back, quiet.

It was hard to get a look at him, because every time I glanced at his face he stared back at me.

My mother declared that the Graces should sleep in my room, with me, and Madame Elizabeth should sleep in her room, with her, leaving Lucien to sleep with Emmanuel in Mama’s old examination room, which Emmanuel would take, now that I was home. As the sleeping arrangements were announced, I watched Louisa and Experience’s faces, closely, but neither one gave anything away. I imagined that they held hands underneath the table, and I felt a rush of sadness. I cupped my own hand, under the lace tablecloth, around empty air, and imagined what it would feel like for another hand to rest there.

I did not want to be in the room alone with them while we all undressed and pretended that none of us knew what had happened. I didn’t think I could bear to hear any of the excuses they would give for why they had not opened the door at Madame Elizabeth’s. It felt, perhaps, even more lonely-making to know they had not trusted me with the truth. So I made a show of announcing I would sit on the porch for a bit before bed.

“I missed the garden,” I told my mother.

Lenore tilted her head. “Leaving home really does change a person,” she said.

But Mama gave an approving smile and kissed my head before taking her candle and leading Madame Elizabeth off, so that they could gossip in peace in her room.

I sat on the porch for a bit, listening to the saw of flies all around the house in the night. It felt like the world was still drowsy from the winter, nothing alive out there in the dark was at its full pitch yet. I counted one Mississippi after another, trying to leave enough time for Experience and Louisa. I grew uncertain, though, if I had waited long enough, and so I stood up from the porch and walked out into the yard, trying to see if the candle was still burning in my room upstairs.

I tilted my head back. I could see the flare of light, where the flame sat on the windowsill of my room. I sighed, waiting for when the two of them would feign sleep and I could return to lie in my own bed, a stranger among friends.

“You hold yourself like that and you could swallow the moon.”

I jerked my head back, and there was Emmanuel Chase, coming down the porch steps to stand with me.

I think I’d known that it would be this way. I think, if I was being honest, I’d hoped that it would.

He smiled, pleased with himself for the bit of poetry. “My nurse used to say that to me, when I was little.”

“A nurse?”

But he was not flustered. He nodded and drew a very short, fat cigar out of his jacket pocket. He sucked on the end but did not move to light it. Not yet.

“It is like that in Haiti,” he said. “The better families have servants.”

“Other Negroes?”

“The people who live in the country, yes. They’re used to work like that.”

I blinked.

“I sound hinkty,” he said.

“You haven’t forgotten that word, at least, with all the French you speak.”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten. Wherever there’s niggers in this world, you need to have a word for uppity.”

I laughed at that, and he smiled wide again. It was a kind of agreement between us.

I stepped back to look up at the window again, to hide my excitement. The candle still burnt.

Emmanuel came to stand beside me and tilted his head back, as well. Then he said, his voice lower, so that no one in the house could hear him,

“My nurse, we learned to call her Ti Me. It means Little Mother. She would tell me stories about the gods. Haiti has different gods than here. They came from Africa, on the ships with the Negro slaves, and stayed—they did not forsake the Negroes there, like they did the Negroes here. They are always around us there.”

“You weren’t scared?”

“No,” he said, still looking up at the window. “My sister was scared and thought it was all heathen nonsense. But I loved them. Ti Me told me a story about the god who has the moon. The goddess. ‘Yon lwa’ is what Ti Me would say. She is called La Sirèn—”

“Haiti has sirens then? Mermaids, like here?”

“She lives under the water, yes. She rules the oceans—she is as changeable as a wave.”

I shivered. “I knew someone once, who used to speak nonsense like that.”