In our pew sat myself, at the farthest end, closest to the church window; Emmanuel, seated beside me; his sister, beside him; and Ti Me, at the aisle. Once, when we were all supposed to have bowed in prayer, I glanced up to see her neck straight, the only head unbent in all the church.

The church was Emmanuel’s father’s greatest pride. A stone building with rough windows dug out of the walls and a high ceiling. There was only one cross in the whole place, he liked to point out. No idolatry here.

We sang hymns in English first, then the Kreyòl translations. Bishop Chase strongly discouraged any hand clapping. “Americans can take it,” he said, “but it excites the Haitians too much.” So the songs swelled, but there was always some large piece missing.

It was nothing like when the Graces sang. It was nothing like when we sang at home in Kings County. It did not look like any fellowship I had known, but the bishop was proud of it, and much of the time spent in church was giving thanks for his intelligence, his humanity, and his hard work here.

Ella did not approve of our swimming lessons. She said it was an affront to the Lord’s day. But Bishop Chase said it was up to a man to decide how he and his wife would spend the rest of the Sabbath, and so Ella only complained once. When we left for the mountains, though, she’d make it a point to get on her knees in the parlor and continue her prayers.

The bishop continued to say nothing. But after the third swimming lesson, the priest began to preach from Ecclesiastes, about the wife cleaving to her husband’s family, about the obedience of marriage. Bishop Chase sat behind him the whole time, in his heavy robes in the heat, not even succumbing to it by fanning himself, as the others did. He was silent, looking straight ahead at some life that none of us could see.

I would reach for Emmanuel’s hand while the priest spoke, if only to show some little sign of defiance, and he would take mine, but just for a moment. Then he would set it back down on the pew between us. Even that small rebellion was too much in his father’s church, though when I would ask him about it, in our bed at night, he would say, “It was hot, Libertie. Too hot to hold hands.”

Libertie,

I have received the notice from Cunningham College. And I understand, now, why you married that silly boy in haste.

I am so angry with you. And you are not even here to rage at! What a clever trick you played on me, my girl. What a lesson you learned at mine and Elizabeth’s knee … the lesson of escape! You turned something so good and righteous against me. You’ve used it to your own earthly ends. I cannot think of a more wicked girl than you, and you know I’ve known my share. You are a deceiver. You are an escape artist. You are a liar.

You chose that man over doing the hard and right thing.

You chose indolence and lust over hard work and humility.

I have no doubt that Emmanuel Chase believes that he loves you. I think you have convinced yourself that you love him. But you know and I know that what you have done is wrong and you have ruined our dreams, your dreams, for what you think is love.

It is not love, Libertie.

Love would not make you think you had to flee your only mother.

You will probably never answer me now. You will probably continue to ignore my letters to you. So be it! So be it! So be it! Know that I hold this against you, though, Libertie. Know how you’ve made your mother rage.

You sat in my waiting room and looked down your nose at me and told me I was not trying hard enough. That I did not understand how to change the world.

You sneered at the white women I courted to keep you in nice dresses and pay for your classes. You stopped only short of calling me a traitor, and it is you who have betrayed me! Who has broken me. Who has deceived me. Who stood before me in a wedding gown and said, “I love you, Mama.” Who gave up your virtue to a silly man so that you would not have to face the truth with me. I see it now.

So all is lost. So you have chosen that life, irrevocably. Do you know a part of me still held out hope you would find your way back to this path? That if I let you go, you would return? But you were already gone, long gone, and did not even bother to tell your mother of it.

You are a fool, and so am I.

Your

Mama

This letter came on a Sunday, after church, and when I read it, it went with the others in the back of the drawer, and I almost cried, I did, that she knew the worst part of me.

But Emmanuel called me down to dinner, and he put his hands on my shoulder and he said, “What is wrong?”

And I was still good to him, in his eyes, so I said, “Nothing,” and I resolved I would not answer my mother again. Not for a long time.

WHEN YOU LEARN to swim, your body is no longer your own. It becomes enthralled to another dimension, that of the water. Your limbs are weightless, but you can feel your hair and clothes becoming heavy.

“Do you open your eyes underwater?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said.

So while I practiced floating, I imagined him just under the surface, eyes open and staring up at me. I was not sure, in that moment, which one of us possessed the other.

This will always be our life together, I told myself as I followed him back down the mountain. I truly believed, then, that this was the start of the world he had promised me. I thought of our time in the pool as his gift to me. During the week, he still would not permit me to join him in his medical work. He said he was not ready yet. Monday mornings in the empty house became easier, though. Ella and I sat side by side or walked to the market together, but my spirit was still on the water.

“You are not so different from me,” Ella said after a few weeks of this. She sat in the parlor, with her embroidery still on her lap.

“I do not think I am so different,” I lied.

“You do. You think you are better than me,” Ella said. “Pride is not attractive on a woman.”

“I assure you, I am humbled.”

“Fanm pale nan tou de bò bouch yo.”

“What does that mean?” I said.

“Three months, and you still have less of a grasp on the language than a baby.” Ella still had her head bent over her sewing.

I closed my eyes. Willed myself to remember floating on the water.

“What is it that you’ve worked on for so many weeks?” I said finally. “Surely you are done?”

She lifted her head. She slit her eyes at me. Then she held up what was in her lap. A jacket, which she held by the shoulders and gave a good shake so that it uncrumpled.

I got up from my seat and went to sit beside her. “May I?” I said.

She nodded.

I took the garment in my hands and turned it over. Close embroidery in that bright red thread. I held it nearer to my eyes. It was words. An incantation. Maybe even a history. I could only make out a few of the words, but I realized she had embroidered a whole story on this jacket in Kreyòl.

“What does it mean?” I said.

“You are like a child, always asking that.”

I stuck my thumb into my mouth and hummed, like a baby would. I had the satisfaction of startling her into a laugh.

“Your estimations are always correct, Ella.”

“Stop.”

“I am an infant and, as such, would be delighted if you schooled me in this.”

She looked at me. I raised my thumb back to my mouth. “All right,” she said. “He hasn’t told you, has he, yet, of the bad year we had here?”

“When your mother and brothers passed. Yes.”

“He has not told you, though, what else happened?”

“No,” I said.

“We were thirteen,” she said. “We had been here three years. We knew the language so well by then. There was a great crime, in Port-au-Prince. We lived there then—we had not yet come here to build the church in Jacmel. A man had sold his niece to the Vodoun priests, and they had slit her throat and drained her blood and drank it and ate her flesh. The government investigated and brought the bad people to justice. We watched them burn in the capital square. Ti Me, my brother, and I. We saw God’s law that day. It was extraordinary. Emmanuel fainted, and Ti Me kept saying, “It is not right.” She stayed at the square till the last of the embers died down. I think she was waiting for something. I do not know what. My brother was very upset. He said it was a tragedy. That they should never have burnt those terrible people. He still says it was a tragedy. He wrote to me about it, even when he was with you, in New York. So I began to make this for him. To remind him of the true history. I wrote it—see, I stitched it in thread. So he will always remember.”

As she spoke, she’d taken the jacket from me and fanned it over her lap. She ran her fingers over the stitches, again and again, as if she was mesmerizing herself. The thread was red and ragged, from her touching it over and over, and the jacket itself, which had started out white, I think, was a dun gray. It was like a child’s rag doll, pulled apart by the child’s own desire. But Ella treated it like a prize.