“I learned,” he said as he let one key fall against my thigh and picked up another, to work off the ring. “I learned, as I learned to love this place, that the keys were an illusion. Why would you live in a place as beautiful as this and lock out the night sky? I promised myself that if they were ever given to me, I would exorcise their power. When we were sixteen and I found out that Ella got the keys because she was now the woman of the house, I was heartbroken. And she would never let me touch them, because she knew I meant to strip them of their power.”

He picked up the last key, began to work it off the ring. “But I have something even sweeter. I have this day, where I see the keys at the waist of my wife,” he said, “and you are mine, and I am yours, and it makes the fact of that even more real to my family.”

He led me to our bed, where he gently pushed my shoulders till I lay on my back, and lifted my skirt. He placed each key, warm from his shaking hand, across my bare stomach, while I whispered that he should stop moaning—his father and sister could clearly hear him.

But his ecstasy over those keys did not keep him close to me. The next morning, Emmanuel left at dawn, as he had taken to doing. He spent his days on an endless round of visits. To his mentor, the one other doctor in town. To his father’s friends and associates—the men who made up the American Negro colony in Jacmel. Sometimes, he came back to the house very late at night, even after his father had eaten and retired to bed.

I was left to spend my days with Ella and Ti Me and the bishop. I say “days,” but it may as well have been the same day, over and over again, so little did it change. Ella was always awake before I was, even if, in the dark, Emmanuel and the rooster crowing outside woke me. She spent her mornings working at her embroidery in the parlor—her incomprehensible jacket. Around ten, she would stow it away in a basket she kept underneath the battered divan, and we would all go to the market.

Ti Me went to the same stalls each day and made the same bargains. I realized on the fourth day, from the rhythm of their voices, that this was not so much an argument but a friendly conversation. Sometimes, Ti Me said something quick and low that made the woman laugh and made Ella blush and sniff about morals. I wished then, more than anything, that I could understand. Always, at the end of it, both women turned to me—Ella sullenly, Ti Me with clear amusement at the awkwardness it was causing her—for the coins in the purse at my side.

We returned to the house for the hottest part of the day. Ella took to her room. She said she could not withstand the heat of the tropics, despite having lived there from childhood. Sometimes, I went upstairs, too, but I grew restless lying beneath the sheet, the shutters closed against the heat, listening to the world outside slow down.

When the world began moving again in the late afternoon, it brought the American women of the colony over to the house. There were about ten of them in total—wives of the men who had followed Bishop Chase, the helpmeets of traders and farmers—all of them with the same pale skin as Ella, not a black one among them. The darkest was a very thin woman with yellow skin and no husband, who taught the Haitian women in a kind of domestic academy.

They would all arrange themselves around Ella, who would lead the conversation, usually begun by relating an imagined indignity suffered in the market. The untrustworthiness and the untapped potential of Haitian women was the main topic of conversation. How great the country could be, it was agreed, if only those women understood their place in a chaste home. Instead, they wandered to market and upset the order of the world.

Like Ella, none of these women had been to America for a very long time. The America they described was a kind of dream, where Negro people lived in perfect harmony, with kind and just laws, and every Negro woman stayed home to stitch counterpanes while her husband entered the world. I could not tell if they had been so long gone that they really believed this fantasy to be true, or if it was a collective fiction they engaged in together to pass the time, but to hear it made me wish to scream.

I attempted, once, very early on, to set them right. I told them of the red marks the whites had left on our doors. I said, “There are men following the law right now whom white men string up on trees for exercising their rights.”

There was a pause in the room. One woman covered her mouth. Another murmured, “Mercy.”

Ella did not even look up from the sewing work in her lap. Her hands moved the needle in and out of the fabric, humming like a cicada. “But there is justice in America,” she said. “It will be set right. Here, Negroes cut down other Negroes for politics, too. It is our own against our own. In America, we are not so uncivilized as that.”

I very nearly rushed across the room and ripped the embroidery from her hands. Instead, I stood and left, and I made it a habit to do so every afternoon, when I had sat long enough to be deemed polite. The only thing that saved me was the knowledge that the world my husband was building, that I was sure I would soon join him in building, was bigger than what Ella or those women could possibly imagine. I held this knowledge close to me and it cooled me in the middle of these endless, turgid afternoons, as if I had pressed a wet cloth to the back of my neck.

At some point during each discussion, a woman would excuse herself to go to Bishop Chase’s door, by prearrangement. “I forgot,” she would say, “the bishop asked to see me,” and she would get up, and none of the other women in the room would meet her eye, and Ella, especially, would double down in her viciousness as soon as the woman took her leave.

It was always the darker women, or, I should say, the less pale ones who went, and I thought that was what made Ella rage. She had the worst case of colorstruck I’d ever seen, and I figured it was so bad she was even begrudging these women the chance to talk a little salvation with her father in his library. I pitied her for it, and it made me even more wary of her.

The bishop himself avoided both Ella and me, and Ti Me, though he was home when we were, more often than not. He still did not say a word to me directly. Sometimes, he let his eye rest on the fold of my skirt or my apron and he frowned in disapproval, but he never spoke. It was strange to live in a man’s house and serve his son and not speak to him, but I thought of Mr. Grady—how shy he had been, how he had avoided speaking to me then—and I thought it must be the same with the bishop. But I did not respect the bishop or yearn to know him half as much as I had Mr. Grady. I thought of him more as an example of the worst parts of Emmanuel, and it was a relief that he did not try to talk to me. Seeing him made me scared of the kind of man my husband could possibly become. And I did not want that for him. For no one was loved in that neighborhood more than he, and it was through this love that everyone else—that is, our Haitian neighbors, not the sour-faced American women who followed Ella’s whims—said my new name with respect and pride.

“Madam Chase, se madanm mesye Emmanuel!”

I had always thought titles were silly. Or rather, the only one to be respected was “Doctor.” But I took an inordinate, stubborn pride in my new name, in the name I was now called in the streets when I walked to market with Ti Me and Ella. Madame Chase, Madame Chase, Madame Chase.

“Call me that, please,” I said, teasing Emmanuel at night, and this delighted him almost as much as the iron keys on my naked body.

“You know, Madame Chase,” he said, “it is a kind of work, to call things by their true names. To change their names.”

“A kind of work?”

“That is what we call the practice of Vodoun when it is done. A work. It is an industry for the spirit. It is a task of repair. And it can be as simple as giving something its rightful name. As I have and as the streets have done for you. And, look, you embrace it. And so we will be right.”

I wanted, so badly, to believe him.

Dear Libertie,

I feel it is time to speak plainly. There is no reason not to anymore. I have tried, as your mother, to only speak to you the truth, to remain impartial, to have you grow up with a love as pure as justice. But what good has that done? You’ve still chosen the flesh, anyways. So let me be fleshy, here, with you, since it makes no difference.

I miss you more than I thought possible. It was different when you were gone to school, and I was sure you would be returned to me. But you have passed over into a divide where I do not believe you can ever come back fully. And I mourn your passing.

When your father died, I spent three weeks in bed. Nearly in bed. I was alone in the house—my own father had passed a year before. Reverend Harland came to see me only once. But when he came, I was sitting up in bed, my mouth open wide in a scream with no sound coming out. I scared him in my grief. The Reverend has never been a brave man. The only other person to come see me was Lenore, who came every few days to hold her hand over my open mouth, to make sure I was still breathing, and to bring biscuits, hard as stone, from some of the women at church.