He sucked on the end of the cigar again, a sound almost like a kiss, which made my stomach lurch.

“Really?” he said. “So you’ve already heard of La Sirèn, who is so beautiful she takes men underwater with her, who possesses her subjects and makes them walk as though they had fins for legs. And they gasp—oh, they gasp—because they cannot breathe air anymore, and the only way to get them to stop is to douse them with water. I have seen it myself, as a boy, in the temples Ti Me took me to.

“Sometimes, La Sirèn gets jealous and she’ll drown a man and take him down under and teach him her magic. When he comes back to the surface, his skin is light, as bright as mine, and his hair is straight, and he knows all about the world.”

“Is that why you look like that, then?”

He laughed. “But you told me you already knew all about her. That another man has already told you this tale. And who was he?”

I felt the grass, insistent, on the bottom of my shoes. I felt the calm cold of the night air. “There was a man my mother tried to help. Madame Elizabeth tried to help him, too. He was a funny sort of man—he stole away here before the war. But he couldn’t abide freedom. It was almost as if he couldn’t understand it. That sounds wrong, but that’s how he acted. He said his sweetheart, who had long died, was here with him, that she wore pink and white and loved sweet cakes and that he only wanted to be with her. He became upset when he caught her with three wedding rings on her finger, so he claimed, and he drowned himself in the river. All because he was sick with love and freedom.”

Even as I said it, I felt a roll in my stomach. I had never given Ben Daisy’s history like that to anyone so plain. To do so felt like a betrayal of Mama, and I half expected her to throw open the house’s front door and stare me down. But the door stayed shut.

“Ah,” Emmanuel said. “That was not La Sirèn. That was Erzulie Freda. She is the goddess of love, and she is married to the god of the sky, the god of the ocean, and the god of iron. She loves hard and loves beautifully, but she is never satisfied. She ends every day crying for what she has not done, what she cannot have. Your poor man had no chance against her.”

He hadn’t heard me, I thought. Or he thought my story was part of our dance. Or maybe what I had said about Mr. Ben was too monstrous. Imagine telling a revolutionary like him that freedom made a man sick. I felt a burn of shame at my perversity. I wanted to be better for him. So I did not say, “You misunderstood.” Instead, I said, “I suppose you are correct.”

The window was still illuminated. As I remembered Ben Daisy, the song I had made up for him came back to me, as loud as the flies drowsing in Mama’s garden.

When I looked back at Emmanuel, I saw he was watching me, in the light of the moon, with those wide-set, watery eyes. He was still sucking on the end of the cigar.

“Why haven’t you lit it yet?”

“You have to taste it first, before you can light it. I brought ten of them from home, and have been trying to ration them.” Then, still looking at me with interest, he said, “I save them for special occasions.”

I thought, with a flash, of how he had watched my face as he gave his speech at dinner, that silly remark about the moon.

“There is nothing special about tonight,” I said, despite knowing what he meant.

“But there is,” he said. “It is very rare that I can meet a devotee of Erzulie herself, this far north, near the waters of a river as cold and muddy as one in Kings County.”

“So I am a goddess of love, then.”

“If you insist,” he said.

It was a game I was no longer sure how to play. To be earnest seemed wrong. I thought of Mrs. Grady’s hectoring. I was not quite up to that, either. Louisa and Experience, they were true with each other. Quick, Libertie, quick, I told myself. Something clever. But all I could say was, “Why are you interested, then?”

“My father thinks the Haitian gods are demons. He thinks it is his life mission to get every Haitian to Christ and to forget the blasphemies. But I think those gods are our genius. The genius of the Negro people. Our best invention. And Erzulie, the goddess of love, she’s called with honey and flowers and sweet things, and she speaks to the longing, the desire for perfection in this world, and our sorrow that we will never achieve it. And I try to stay close to people who know her.”

“But none of it is real,” I said. “It was a thing Ben Daisy made up when he couldn’t stand to be here. And I was just a child. That’s why I believed him.”

Emmanuel Chase finally struck a match and lit his cigar, and the heavy smoke rolled over both of us. “It was real enough to drown the man. I think it is remarkable.”

It was my turn to speak, my turn to say something fascinating to him, but I could think of nothing. My bedroom window was dark now.

I only pointed up above, at the moon, just a sliver of white behind a black ribbon of clouds. He followed my gaze. He breathed heavily, and another gust of too-sweet smoke came over us.

“Good night,” I said.

“Good night, then, Libertie.”

Upstairs, at the entrance to my own room, I stood at the door for a minute, my hand on the knob, afraid it wouldn’t turn. But it did, easily enough, and in the dark I could just make out the two rounded forms of the Graces, on opposite sides of the bed, a clear space between them.

I crawled into the space. Louisa turned and breathed in, then coughed.

“You smell like a bad man,” she murmured.

Experience sneezed.

“It was Dr. Chase’s cigar,” I said, even though I knew she spoke in her sleep. “He smokes in the garden at night. Cigars he has to work up to taste.”

“Hmm,” Louisa said. Then she turned on her back, away from me. Experience turned in the other direction.

For a long time, I lay between my two friends’ love, my eyes open in the dark, breathing in the smell of the night curdled with the stink of cigar through the open window, where Emmanuel Chase, I guessed, still stood below, smoking at the moon.

IN THOSE DAYS, in Brooklyn, Tom Thumb weddings were all the rage.

The prettiest boy and the most docile girl of any Sunday school class would be chosen as the groom and bride. Churchwomen would spend weeks sewing a morning suit for the boy—silk and velvet cut down for a child’s shoulder span. For the girl, a veil and train made comically long, so that she would look even smaller and slighter when she walked to the altar. To act as the reverend, they would ask the child who loved to play the most—one who could ignore his classmates’ tears and keep the gag going with his comical sermon. People paid good money to see them, and to laugh at the children weeping at the altar, unsure if they’d just been yoked to their schoolyard nemesis for life.

This passion for children’s marriages came on us quick after the war. It was a celebration and an act of defiance and a joke—we could marry legally now, even though we knew our marriages were always real, whether the Constitution said it or not. So real a child could know it, too.

Louisa had insisted we add one to our benefit.

“It makes the children cry every time,” I said.

“We’ll sing ‘Ave Maria’ to drown out their tears,” Louisa said.

I looked to Experience, who shrugged. “They get to keep their costumes when it’s over, don’t they? Tears are a small price to pay for a new dress.”

I’d laughed. “You are both hard women.”

But I was not laughing while Louisa and Experience stayed at my mother’s house, preparing their voices for the performance, and I stood in the church, six little girls lined up in front of me, four of them already weeping.

I grabbed the hot hand of the girl closest to me. “That’s Caroline,” Miss Annie called as I pulled the girl out of the church, past the graveyard, to the copse of trees where Ben Daisy used to wait for his love.

Now the little girl Caroline stood before me in tears. “Stay here,” I ordered. I tried to be stern, but this only made her cry harder.

I knelt down and touched her shoulder. “You must know it’s just for play? You won’t really marry anyone. You just have to wear a pretty dress and walk down the aisle.” Then, “Look, look here.” I squeezed her hand once, then dropped it quickly and stepped ten paces away from her, until I was out of the trees, nearly to the graveyard’s gate.

“Watch me, Caroline,” I called. “This is all you have to do.”

And then I counted to myself—one, two, three—and took the exaggerated steps of a march to where Caroline, skeptical, stood in the shade. I held my head up and twisted my face into a grin, which, I realized, probably frightened her more.

“You walk and smile,” I said through clenched teeth. “Walk and smile, and then you get to the front and bow your head and wait, and when everyone claps, it’s over, and we give you sweets and flowers.”

“That is precisely how marriage works,” I heard from the set of trees, and there was Emmanuel Chase.