“Yes,” I said. “Exactly that. Flowers and sweets. So what is the point of carrying on?”

“I don’t want to marry Daniel,” Caroline said. She had stopped crying and was watching us both with interest.

“It’s the same as when you play with your sister or your friends,” I said. “It’s not real.”

“That’s not very kind to Daniel,” Emmanuel said. “His heart will be broken.”

Caroline looked at me uncertainly, her eyes threatening more tears.

“You confuse her for the sake of a joke,” I said.

It had been all well and good to try to flirt with Emmanuel at night, while looking up at my window, my mother a few feet away. But it was less appealing here, in the woods, with only a six-year-old as witness.

Emmanuel Chase knelt down and said with great ceremony, for my benefit, “Listen closely to Miss Libertie.” Then he stood up and smiled at me.

It was strange, to see the way Caroline looked at Emmanuel Chase—it was pure adoration, mixed with a little bit of fear. “Go on,” he said to her, and Caroline closed her eyes and began to march, her knees raised to her chest, her arms stretched out in front of her, lurching toward me where I stood at the edge of the circle of trees.

When she reached me, she opened her eyes, her arms still held out as if she was balancing a great weight, and whispered, in a voice loud enough for him to hear, though she didn’t wish it, “Is the white man still watching us?”

I lightly slapped her arms down. “Dr. Chase is a Negro, just like you,” I said.

She looked at him over her shoulder again, to make sure, which he laughed at.

“Now walk back,” I said, “slower. You do not have to lift your knees as high. March on my clap. And go slow.”

When she reached Emmanuel Chase, he looked at her awkwardly, then reached out, turned her around by the shoulders, and sent her back to me.

So we did this a few times, sending Caroline back and forth between us, sometimes watching each other, until she grew tired. “I know it,” she insisted. “I know it now. Let me be.”

She did her slow, lurching march all the way back to the church, and then Emmanuel and I were alone together. By then, the shadows of the trees had grown long enough to reach me where I stood. I allowed myself to feel the cold for a moment, then stepped back into the sun. He followed.

We stood there, both looking at the church. Today, there were no props for him to play with. He looked almost nervous. It pleased me to imagine that I made him nervous. He raised one hand to his temple and then dropped it just as suddenly.

“I have thought a lot about what you told me,” I said, to break the silence. He looked relieved.

“It really is remarkable,” he said.

“This is where I used to play with Ben Daisy when I was a girl. But still, I don’t know anything about the gods you talked about.”

“Well,” he said, “not many of us here do. But in Haiti, everyone knows them.”

“Even the Christians?”

“Everyone’s a good Christian in Haiti.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s possible to be many things at once, Libertie.”

I walked a little farther into the warmer part of the grass.

“You like riddles,” I said.

“It’s not a riddle. It’s like the marriage you’ll officiate.”

“Another riddle,” I said. “You aren’t doing much to convince me.”

“But it is,” he said. It had caught his imagination now, and he turned toward me, eager to talk. “When a man and woman marry, they become one, correct? One being bound together, but two very separate people. They remain separate, but act and work as one, for the better of all.”

“You are very modern,” I said, laughing. “A woman remains separate from a man? She’s not swallowed in him, whole, to replace that missing rib?”

I had found my rhythm with him now, I thought. I understood now why Madeline Grady teased so much. It made it easier to talk to a man if you pretended everything they said to you was false.

But Emmanuel Chase was hard to understand, because sometimes he became very earnest. As now. He reached out to catch at the tallest cattail and broke it off, then tossed it away, impatient. “I believe in companionate marriage,” he said, rather proudly.

“So you are very modern.”

“It is only logical that a man and wife should share friendship and charity and understanding. They should be friends for life.”

This embarrassed me, and so I looked away. “That’s where my father is buried,” I said, pointing at the grave. FREEDOM stood out on it, as stark as ever, but his name had worn down, no longer deep in the stone but risen faint to the surface. “I do not know if it was that way between my mother and father, though it makes me sad to think she lost not only her husband but her closest friend.”

“It is a pity. A house needs a man and a woman to function.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “We did just fine.”

He smiled, as if he disagreed but was too polite to say, and I felt a rush of sympathy for my mother, a wish to defend her.

“Was it like that with your parents?” I asked. “Were they companions?”

He didn’t turn from my father’s grave. “No,” he said. “They were nothing of the sort.”

And then he was silent, and we listened to the wind move over the grass and, behind us, an exasperated Miss Annie telling the children to quiet.

I was too embarrassed to ask him more. And he did not seem to want to relieve the silence; he stood in it as if it was the most comfortable place to be. Finally, I could not stop myself.

“Is it strange,” I said, “being here in America, after so long away?”

“Everything is grayer. I had forgotten that. The trees, the clothing, the people’s faces. Even the sun is grayer here than it is there.”

“Is it so beautiful there?”

“It’s a better world there,” he said. “Or it will be. Very soon.”

“You’re not a patriot anymore.”

“I am not as optimistic as Lucien or your mother,” he said.

I looked up finally. He was staring at me again. “I never thought of my mother as an optimist.”

“She is only that,” he said. “What other word would you use to describe a colored woman who has so thoroughly decided to work with whites, who trusts the white women who come into her office telling tales about hurt spleens, but won’t trust me to touch those same women with my bare hands?”

“They used to ask me to turn to the wall,” I said, “when she was examining them. Mama said it was because they were jealous, that I was young and they were not any longer.”

“I could understand that,” he said.

He said, “When you blush, your skin glows darker somehow. It’s remarkable.”

“It should not be.”

“You don’t find this place changed, since you’ve been away?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I missed it, I thought. It was mostly just—different. But now I am not sure I can call it home.”

“Is that why you are now an impresario?”

“You can make fun if you’d like. I’ve never found anything truer in this world than Louisa and Experience singing. And the one thing my mother taught me, above all, is to fight for truth when you find it.”

“That’s very pretty.”

“You are making fun again.”

“No, it is very pretty. But also not true.”

It was a thrill to hear someone outwardly doubt my mother. I had never heard it before, and a part of me leapt to him as he said it.

“She’s taught you so many good things, though,” he continued. “You probably got a better medical education as a child than I have now.”

“I am not a very good student,” I ventured. I almost told him right then, that I was disgraced. But then he said, “Oh, I find that very hard to believe,” and I thought perhaps we were back in the language of flirtation, with no place for truth.

I wished I could be whatever it was that he saw when I stood before him. It was clearly not the same person that the Graces saw, or Alma Curtis or Madeline Grady, or even who Mama saw, when she looked at me. He looked at me as if I was a wondrous being, as if my voice was a song, as if I was magic. And I did not want to disappoint him.

By then, the sun had shifted, and we were on the cold side of the field again. He held out his arm to me, and I took it, and he walked me back toward the road, toward my mother’s house.

“You are not at the hospital,” I said. “Why?”

“It’s too nice a day to be indoors.” And then glanced at me. “Good, you don’t believe me. I told your mother I wished to work on some notes back at the house, and when I was on the way there, I was lucky enough to see you and the little girl in the field. A happy coincidence.”

“My mother lets you come and go.”

“I’m not a servant here,” he said, sounding offended, which seemed strange to me.

“She never did with me,” I said. “I could only leave the clinic for errands. She said if I got too used to wandering off on my own, it would break my concentration. She knew it took me so long to work it up.”

“So you were a servant then. The little scullery maid, forced to become a doctor.”