Because our ship was headed to Haiti, there was no embarrassment about our berth. On Haitian ships—at least this one—colored people were allowed cabins. Already, this world was better. The ship’s captain knew Emmanuel’s father, and so we had a private cabin, given over to us with much winking and nodding, so much that I could not look anyone on board in the eye.

Mama did not come to see me off—she took her leave at her own front door. Lenore was the one who stood on the pier below us and waved the white handkerchief for us, the last little bit of home I would see for a long time, maybe until I died. That thought brought a sharp taste to my tongue, a tightness to my throat. Not tears, because I had promised myself I would not cry about saying goodbye to that world, Mama’s world; I had promised myself I would celebrate. I saw Lenore’s handkerchief flash once more, and I turned my head to spit into the ocean, to get rid of that acid within me.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in the cabin. I was seasick. I did not know this about myself, as I had never traveled for so long on a boat before. It made me hate water and curse waves as we were rolled around over and over again. My head had a dull ache. Sometimes, Emmanuel would bring me cups of musty water, flat beer, sour cider. I could not eat the biscuits and dried fish that everyone else did. Even the sight of the curled tails, studded in salt, made me turn and be sick. I was miserable.

The only relief came at night. That first one, Emmanuel lay beside me, stinking of petrified fish, and told me to lie down on my stomach. “Take off your nightgown,” he said.

I should have felt scared or shy. If I was a good woman, I would have felt trepidation at the first person besides Mama to see me whole. But all I felt was the roll of the waves, and relief that I could get the muslin off my sweaty skin.

I shut my eyes tight while he traced a botany lesson on my skin with a single finger

“Dorstenia,” he said. “It looks like a tiny tree, crowned with a shooting star. You do not have trees like this, in America. It is a cousin of the fig. Its flower isn’t soft and inviting …” Here, his finger traced all the way down to my hips, where they met my thighs, lingered there, then made its way back up. “Its flower is hard and standoffish. It is called a ‘shield flower.’ Its face looks like a wall of stone. But when you look more closely, you see the flower is made up of a hundred little blossoms, all closed off tight.” He had reached my shoulders again, spread out his hands, felt the strength of my back.

“Why do you tell me these things now?” I asked. “You do not speak like a lover.” I at least felt calm enough to tease.

“Because as my wife,” he said, “there will be a whole new knowledge to learn, to aid me, and we may as well begin now.”

His voice was light, so I opened my eyes and saw the shape of him roll above me, before I closed them again, still cowed by the waves.

“But what if I am too sick to remember?”

“I’m not speaking to you. The lessons are not for you. They’re for your body. She will remember.” And then I felt his hand again, in the middle of my back, drawing, I suppose, the flowers that made up the shield of a Dorstenia.

He touched me until his fingers trembled. I shut my eyes even tighter, pressed myself into the hay mattress of the berth. His fingers lifted, and then I felt him turn over, onto his own back. He breathed hard and heavy, as if he was at a gallop, and the sheet that covered us began to shake.

I opened my eyes, sat up on my elbows, and watched him.

A man touching himself is a peculiar thing. My mother had told me about women’s bodies but not men’s. I’d seen male members on barnyard cats before, and sometimes rude and red on a stray dog. I remembered, once, glimpsing one, folded over on itself in a nest of gray hair, between the legs of an old man whom Mama helped to dying. I’d been six or seven then, and Mama had had to ask me three times to hand her her bag, before she’d looked up and followed my gaze. She’d pursed her lips, pulled the man’s cloak over him, and said, “You shouldn’t make patients uncomfortable with staring, Libertie.”

At Cunningham, in anatomy class, they had asked me to leave the room during the lessons on glands. I’d leaned against the side of the building, staring out into the unfinished green, listening to the muffled voice of the professor calling out the body parts. When the class was done, the men had left and I returned to the room, alone, to the lesson written on the chalkboard, to name the parts to myself. Since no one was in the room with me, I’d practiced saying them in different voices—high-pitched, like a superior lady’s, or low and growly, like a cat’s.

I watched my husband’s hand move faster. In the dark of the cabin, his skin was so dim—like a gray stone glimpsed at the bottom of a well. His breath shuddered. The whole cabin, so close, became nearly unbearably hot. And then he groaned—like a body taking its last breath—and shuddered one more time and was quiet.

I looked at him. He was staring glassily at the beams of the ship. “I’m sorry, my love,” he said. When he reached to touch my cheek, his hand was damp.

I did not leave my bed the next day. I tried to stand in the cabin, but the roll of the ship nearly forced me to my knees, so I crawled back into the berth and shut my eyes.

Emmanuel left me to walk on the deck. Above the groan of the ship as it moved through the water, I heard his high shout or some of his laughter.

The ship was a trading one that sold only a few berths to travelers. In the morning, he pulled me out of our bed to walk the deck with him. He said, “You cannot lie down forever. It will make everything worse.” My legs did not feel like my own. I was scared, and I took just a few steps before going back down. I did not know if there were any other women on board, or if there were, if those women were colored. And in my sickness, I did not have the will to ask him.

That night, he did not even have to ask me to lie down. I did so gladly, eager to feel something besides the waves.

“Plumeria,” he said, “are beautiful flowers. Long and thin and white. They look almost like stars, or maybe the legs of jellyfish. They could be as at home beneath the water as on land. They smell strongest at night.” Here, he leaned over and smelled my lap.

“The smell is beautiful,” he said. “So beautiful that three hundred years ago an Italian count stole it from the isles and made it into a perfume. The flowers make it to lure in sphinx moths, to do their pollinating for them. The moths are driven mad by the scent, looking everywhere for nectar, but the flowers are a flirt. Like my Libertie sometimes is. They have no nectar, but they’ve convinced the moths to do their propagating for them.”

And here, his fingers stopped trailing on my spine and swept down, and his whole hand grabbed my behind.

He was already touching himself. I turned over, and he knew I would watch him, so he looked into my eyes, his face looking first furious, then frightened, and then so melancholy I worried he would weep. He finally closed his eyes. His shoulders shuddered, he groaned again, like the ship in the ocean, and then he was still.

I was determined to walk the whole ship the next morning. I did so on my husband’s arm—he took me to the front and the other end. He made a show of calling me his “dear wife.” He said, “We are to live in Haiti.” I realized that the white men on board were mostly Northerners. It probably had not occurred to them, until that moment, that Emmanuel was colored. A few of them looked at him as if he had played some sort of trick. They, perhaps, had taken me for some sort of concubine. The crew was mostly Negroes—some American, but most from Haiti. They said, “Trè bèl” when they saw me, and tipped their hat if they had one.

There was one other woman on board, a white one, the captain’s daughter. She looked to be my age, maybe a few years younger. She looked straight through me when we passed, made a show of looking straight ahead.

“How much longer is the trip?” I asked Emmanuel.

“We have been on this journey for five days,” he said. “We have eight or nine more.”

Before us, the sea stretched in all directions, the water a deep green. “Do you see there?” he said, leaning in to point, his cheek on mine. “Look over there. Dolphins jumping in the waves.”

It only looked like flashes of light, and I told him so.

“No,” he said. “They’re dolphins.”

“Or maybe they are sirens,” I said “come to lure all these men to their deaths.”

“La Sirèn has a song,” he said solemnly. “They say her home is at the back of the mirror. In the other world.”

He did not move his mouth from my ear. Instead, he chanted into it,

La Sirèn, la balèn,

Chapo m’ tonbe nan lanmè.

M’ t’ap fè yon ti karès ak La Sirèn,

Chapo m’ tonbe nan lanmè.

M’ kouche ak La Sirèn,

Chapo m’ tonbe nan lanmè.

“What does it mean?”

“You have to guess.”

“I do not know your language well enough yet.”

“And you’ll never learn it with that attitude.”

“Tell me what it means.”