“When she’d showed the food to all the twins present, she took the basin off her head, cast it down, and commanded us to eat. Ti Me told us to eat as much as we liked, until we were satisfied, but just to be sure we did not break any bird or goat bones with our teeth.

“It was a mass of all us children, pulling the food up with our hands, pushing it into our mouths. Ella, though, refused to eat. She was too scared to defy the adults outright, but she spit the food into her hands when they weren’t looking. In the frenzy, I ate double her portion, to help her out.

“ ‘èske ou te manje ase?’ they kept asking. Have you eaten enough? There were many children, but the kid goat had been fat, the hen, too, and the juice ran down my chin. Every other twin’s face shone with grease in the moonlight.

“All during this, they sang a song. It is the song of the twins,” Emmanuel said. “Should I sing it for you now?”

The only sound was the two of us, shifting slightly in the water.

“Yes,” I said.

He took a deep breath and began.

Mwen kite manman m’ nan peyi

Gelefre

Marasa elou

Mwen kite fanmi m’ nan peyi Gelefre

M’ pa gen fanmi ki pou pale pou mwen

Marasa elou

Mwen pa gen paran ki pou pale pou mwen

Marasa elou

I walked through the water where Emmanuel still lay, churning up swells with each step. When I reached him, I sank down onto my knees in the cold.

“Do you understand it?” he said.

“I think so.” I closed my eyes and began, haltingly.

“I have left my mother in Africa.

“I have left my family in Africa.

“I have no family to speak for me.

“I have no relations to speak for me.”

“Marasa elou,” he said.

I lay back in the water beside him. I began to shiver.

“That’s when I started to believe,” Emmanuel said. “That’s when I understood what this land had for me. Ella is unstable. She has never adjusted to life here. But I have, and I’ve thrived because of what I have taken in. Because of what Ti Me did for us, for me, on that night. That was my introduction to the work, and it is my most cherished act here. Do you understand? Ti Me saved me. The work saved me.”

“You believe it all then? About twins and home and songs,” I said. “And you call your sister mad?”

“Of course I believe it. The new ways here, it’s where the people are free. We cannot be a nation if we don’t have gods in our own image. They made these gods—do you understand? Just as your mother made her place and you made your own. They go further, where we need to. We will never be free until we do as they do.”

“You would believe in magic?”

“I would have us serve the spirits.” He dipped back in the water then, almost gone under, but then I saw he was pulling himself out, to look at me.

“I had thought you would understand,” he said. “I wish my father would understand. I think Ella, in her own way, does understand. It’s why she is so frightened of it all. She knows there’s power there, but she isn’t sure what kind. I believe we will not become a people until we have gods that understand us.”

“You speak in riddles.”

“I have told you from the beginning. This is my ambition. I can bring what I have learned in America and help the people here, with what they already have. I am building a new world. In the new world”—he curled his hand around my wrist, under the water—“we will be equals, you and I. We will be who we wish to be. There will be no limits on what we can dream or what we can do. You believed it when we married, and nothing has changed. Do not let this business with Ella make you think it is not possible.

“I was not forthcoming about Ella, this is true. I worried she would mean you wouldn’t marry me, that you wouldn’t marry into a family with people who were unwell. But everything else I’ve told you about myself should let you know I love you enough to chart new gods for you.”

When we left the rock pool, I was still shivering. Emmanuel walked ahead of me, his back strong and straight, his shirt soaked through. I could just make him out as the night reached up to hold us.

Manman Poul grate, grate jouk li jwenn zo grann li

Mother Hen scratched and scratched till she reached her grandmother’s bones

Libertie,

I was too angry to write again for a long time. I wrote you many letters and burnt each one, because Lenore said they were too harsh.

I am still angry, to think what I have lost and what has been ruined.

This is the life I had imagined for you. That we would have that coach with the gold lettering. That you would carry on my good deeds. That you would be my great act of love in the world and my redemption. My apology to your father for not understanding where he came from. My atonement to our people for failing them over and over and over again, when I couldn’t set them right.

You would be brilliant and set them right. But you are not even right within yourself, I think. And you cannot even understand what I had given you, all I had given you, to prepare you to fight.

They say the Negroes now are a different breed than in my day. The colored people are different. Bolder. And maybe that’s what you are. Not my daughter but a daughter of a different age. Maybe your boldness serves better for these times than my fidelity. Maybe my Libertie is really the clever one, and it is Mama who is the betrayer.

Write to me, Libertie dear, and set your mama straight. Give me your words, please. I cannot take your silence.

Love

Your

Mama

I NEVER WROTE her back, because I discovered on Fet Gede that I’d fallen pregnant. That morning, I woke up to the sound of the drums. The drumming was something I had grown used to—it came from the temples that dotted the road to the water basins, and oftentimes, as Emmanuel and I rode back in the dark, we could hear it echo around us, off the trees.

After Emmanuel told me his life’s work, I tried to do my best to make it my own. I had thought it was all poetry—though better poetry than what I’d written for Mama or the woman in the water, because it was inspired by love for me. But it wasn’t just poetry; it was the logic by which he governed his actions and his mind, and I told myself I must learn it if I belonged to him now.

I thought that it explained the long silences between him and his father. I looked at Ella and tried to see her with the compassion that Emmanuel did. Her heat-stiffened hair, her sweaty, pale skin, the way she looked with fear and anger at the women in the market. Love her. Love her. Love her for it, I told myself. But mercy is hard to cultivate, when it’s for a stranger who tells you you’re only as good as what’s between your legs and ignores you for hours on end.

Emmanuel must become your religion, I told myself. Submit to him as you would to any preacher. It is the only way to survive here. He is your helpmeet and your ally.

During the day, I did well enough. I sat near Ti Me in the cookhouse and tried hard to learn the language, enough so that one day I could ask her about the gods she and Emmanuel loved.

But every night, I betrayed him, when I dreamt of being with my mother.

Sometimes, I dreamt I was a girl, working quietly and companionably with her in her study, the heavy smell of camphor around us. Sometimes, I dreamt I was finally driving the black carriage with DR. SAMPSON AND DAUGHTER drawn in gold on the side. In every dream, Emmanuel, marriage, my desire for him, was forgotten, nowhere to be found. When I woke, I would long for her again, even as Emmanuel’s arm sat heavy across my breast, even as I felt the long naked length of him against my back.

Sometimes, in the dreams, she held me in the softness of her lap, as if I was a child, and swept a gold fan over us.

The drumming that had started all around us that October, that startled me from morning sleep and afternoon rests, was a relief. It shook my head free of grief, and to its rhythm I could sing Love Emmanuel, and so forget my mother.

“The idolatrous Haitians worship the dead,” Ella spat to me, the walls of the sitting room, the sewing in her lap, whenever she heard the drums. Emmanuel had told me that, yes, the dead here held a special place. But what do you call it when you worship a memory of a living person, of one who has never been completely known to you, and when your worship is unwilling, driven not by a desire to honor but because you have realized the world didn’t make sense with her, and does not make sense now that you are without her?

“Fet Gede is their All Souls’ Day, but as with everything outside of America, the sense of humor here is keener,” Emmanuel had told me in bed the night before the holiday. This was his favorite position to tell me stories—while lying down.

“Ella tells me that the men tie skeleton hands to their belts and circle their hips in lewdness,” I said.

“In that, she is not wrong. If there was ever a holy day designed to speak to Ella’s delusions, this is it.”

Already in the night, we could hear music and laughing, louder than usual.

“It is one big celebration for the spirits of those who passed,” Emmanuel said.

“It sounds macabre.”

“It is not.”

“If I went with you, I could see for myself if it is not.”

“But then who would keep the peace with Ella and father?”