They lived in Vinegar Hill, in a small wooden building beside a grog shop. The sounds of her laboring almost drowned out the sounds of the sailors singing shanties next door. She was a very small woman, but loud. I said to her husband, “It is good that she makes so much noise. It means she has fight left in her.”

She was doubled over, walking up and down the room, and so I walked beside her, holding her hand. She had been laboring so long her hand was wet with sweat and kept slipping from mine. I told her, over and over again, what a strong woman she was. What a wonder she was accomplishing. It was her first labor, and these were the things she needed to hear.

Towards the end of it, she screamed once more, very loudly. Then she lifted up her skirt, and what did I see, but the baby’s knee sticking out, foot dangling down, almost doing a little jig.

And the sight of it made me laugh, Libertie, the first time I had laughed since you had gone. I know it was a dire sight. A breeched birth is dangerous, and the woman could have died. But I heard the sailors singing that their love lived in the ocean, and I saw that baby’s knee jerk in time, and I saw the woman’s face, her blink of surprise, and I could only laugh. At the absurdity of the world. The ridiculousness of your absence. The foolishness of whatever I did to cause you to leave me.

You will be glad to know, the woman delivered safely. I had her husband hold her elbows, and I squatted down between her knees, and together we turned the baby until he was straight, and he was delivered, just two hours ago today, by the grace of God our Creator.

I was still laughing when I handed the boy to his mother. She and her husband must have thought me a madwoman, and I am sure they will speak to Rev. Harland about how dotty Dr. Sampson has become in her old age. But even now, as I write you, even though I know the gravest danger we were in, I cannot help laughing. And isn’t that a marvel, Libertie? Is that what you would maybe call grace?

I am not sure what your answer would be. I wish I could see your face just once more, to know what your answer would be. You sent me a message that you were with child, and then nothing. I thought of closing up the hospital and traveling to Haiti myself to find you. But I prayed upon it and felt, to the bottom of my soul, that you will come to me if you are meant to. That I will hear your voice again, whether here on Earth or in heaven.

To my love, my daughter, Libertie

I love you.

Your

Dear

Mama

THE GRACES LEFT as suddenly as they came, to travel over the mountain to Port-au-Prince, in search of that burnt theater. Louisa took with her, rolled up and tied to the string of her bonnet, my letter for my mother, for whenever she saw her again.

After they left, I did not have the strength to move back down to the shed. And so it was in Emmanuel’s bed, after all, where I gave birth to our children.

My labor began at dawn. I was woken from a dream of the grass on my father’s grave by a sudden pain in my hips, running, like scales on a piano, up my spine.

I could smell the salt of my body all around me.

The whole day, I walked the house, while Emmanuel trotted behind me to keep up and Ella called out nonsensical advice and Bishop Chase looked, for the first time since I’d known him, genuinely nervous. By evening, I began to feel tired from the pain, and I shouted at the three of them, “Only Ti Me has any sense.”

Ella was easily enough gotten rid of. She did not like the sound of pain, and she went back to her room, loudly announcing she was of better use praying for me.

But Bishop Chase did not want to leave, and he watched me, with detached interest, as I winced and Emmanuel stroked my face.

“Please,” I whispered to Emmanuel. Even in pain, I did not have the courage to yell at the bishop. “Please ask your father to leave.”

And he did. He went to his father and said, “Papa, go to your study.”

But Bishop Chase would not. He stood in the doorway and watched me labor, and it was only when I started to undo the ties of my smock—I was so overwhelmed with the heat, with the pain, and just wanted to be free—that he turned and left the room.

I walked in pain, and Emmanuel was there each step with me. And I knew there was no other face on Earth I wished to see, at that moment, except for his.

I thought, I have forgiven you.

I watched him as he watched me, as his soft mouth moved, as he held my arm, as we paced the hall together. I thought of his father, whom he still did not have the power to even make leave a room.

I could hear, in the bedroom next to ours, Ella and her father praying. A whisper—they would never pray loud like the Haitians did, like the Graces dared to do. And that made me even angrier—that even now, they would scrape and keep an etiquette of God. Their hushed prayers came over the gap in the ceiling, and it nearly drove me mad. Emmanuel felt the muscles in my arm stiffen and rubbed me gently there.

“It is all right.” He smiled, and I felt my love for him come back.

I have forgiven you, I thought, but I do not think that will be enough.

“What’s wrong?” he said. “Why do you make a face like that?”

“It only hurts,” I said.

At midnight, I sat up in our bed. Emmanuel lay beside me, his breath light.

The pain that was in my body was warm now. It was a pain I had seen when I attended births with Mama. The births back home in Kings County, when I was a girl—every one was a kind of celebration. Because we knew each new child meant we had a claim to the land, to our space of freedom there.

The very first birth I had seen with Mama had frightened me. I had wanted to run from the room while the woman bellowed and hissed, and the air became thick with the smell of something deep and hidden, something that smelled almost lost.

But Mama had given me a look, and I had not dared to leave her side, and on our walk home she had told me, evenly, “You will not understand until you yourself do it, but in birth is the freest you can be. You do not have to take your leave of anyone or do anything for anyone. You are even free of deciding for your body how it will go—it is deciding for you. Your only expectation is to follow, and that is a kind of freedom, if you let it be.”

Now in bed, I felt the next wave of pain and wished that she were here.

The sheet beneath me became wet. Emmanuel was woken up by the damp. He cried out in joy, in excitement. And then he was up, calling for Ti Me and for boiling water and for strips of cloth and for oil.

I wanted to leave the bed again. I wanted to feel the floorboards creak beneath my feet. A line of sweat trickled from under my chin to my chest between my breasts, to the top of my stomach.

I was breathing as hard as if I was racing up the walls of the room. With Mama, sometimes, a woman insisted on laboring with a knife in the bed beside them, to cut the pain. I had thought it silly then, as silly as Mama declaring those moments an emancipation. I had never thought, fully, what it would mean for me to join them there.

“I want Mama.”

“Yes,” Emmanuel said. “Yes.”

By then, Ti Me was there, holding my other elbow. I could feel inside me a great, deep churning. A new world was trying to break out of my body.

It felt as if my hip bones would grind apart. I looked over both their heads to the ceiling and cried up to it. I felt Emmanuel wipe my sweat and tears. My knees began to shake. My spine bore down around itself—I could name every bone as I felt each one break.

I pushed my feet on Emmanuel’s shoulders, a gross inversion of all the times I used to do the same, in pleasure, at night on the boat. And then I heard nothing. Not Emmanuel crying, not Ti Me whispering, not Ella and Bishop Chase’s prayers winding over the ceiling walls.

I heard only the blood rushing in my ears, as pure and steady as a river, and in that one last searing burn of pain, I heard my mother’s voice, wordless, only the tone and timbre that she’d make over our family’s graves.

I felt the heat of my blood between my legs, and when I looked down again, I saw Emmanuel covered in my blood and crying, and Ti Me covered in my blood and smiling, and lying on each of my thighs, my son and my daughter, our children, my children, born into this world I would make for them.

My Dearest Mama,

You have received this letter delivered to you by Louisa and Experience. Know that, as of this writing, I am alive. By the time Louisa and Experience hand this letter to you, I will have delivered your grandchildren.

I do not know what I am or what I will have become by then. I am not sure I ever knew myself. I used to think this was a failing. Something to hide from you. How could I be a righteous woman, to serve the world as you did, if I did not know myself?