Doers of the Word

I saw my mother raise a man from the dead. “It still didn’t help him much, my love,” she told me. But I saw her do it all the same. That’s how I knew she was magic.

The time I saw Mama raise a man from the dead, it was close to dusk. Mama and her nurse, Lenore, were in her office—Mama with her little greasy glasses on the tip of her nose, balancing the books, and Lenore banking the fire. That was the rule in Mama’s office—the fire was kept burning from dawn till after dinner, and we never let it go out completely. Even on the hottest days, when my linen collar stuck to the back of my neck and the belly of Lenore’s apron was stained with sweat, a mess of logs and twigs was lit up down there, waiting.

When the dead man came, it was spring. I was playing on the stoop. I’d broken a stick off the mulberry bush, so young it resisted the pull of my fist. I had to work for it. Once I’d wrenched it off, I stripped the bark and rubbed the wet wood underneath the skin onto the flagstone, pressing the green into rock.

I heard a rumbling come close and looked up and I could see, down the road, a mule walking slow and steady with a covered wagon, a ribbon of dust trailing behind it.

In those days, the road to our house was narrow and only just cut through the brush. Our house was set back—Grandfather, my mother’s father, had made his money raising pigs and kept the house and pens away from everyone else to protect his neighbors, and his reputation, from the undermining smell of swine. No one respects a man, no matter how rich and distinguished-looking, who stinks of pig scat. The house was set up on a rise, so we could always see who was coming. Usually, it was Mama’s patients, walking or limping or running to her office. Wagons were rare.

When it first turned onto our road, the cart was moving slowly. But once it passed the bowed-over walnut tree, the woman at the seat snapped her whip and the mule began to move a little faster, until it was upon us.

“Where’s your mother?”

I opened my mouth but before I could call for her, my mother rushed to the door, Lenore behind her.

“Quick,” was all Mama said, and the woman came down off the seat. A boy, about twelve or thirteen, followed. They were both dressed in mourning clothes. The woman’s skirt was full. Embroidered on the bodice of her dress was a dozen black lilies, done in cord. The boy’s mourning suit was dusty, but perfectly fit to his form. At his neck was a velvet bowtie, come undone on the journey. The woman carried an enormous beaded handbag—it, too, was dusty but looked rich. It was covered in a thousand little eyes of jet that winked at me in the last bit of sun.

“Go, Lenore,” my mother said, and Lenore and the woman and the boy all went to the back of the wagon, the boy hopping up in the bed and pushing something that lay there, Lenore and the woman standing, arms ready to catch it. Finally, after much scraping, a coffin heaved out of the wagon bed. It was crudely made, a white, bright wood, heavy enough that Lenore and the woman stumbled as they carried it. When the coffin passed me, I could smell the sawdust still on it.

My mother stepped down off the stoop then, and the four of them lifted it up and managed it into the office. As soon as they got it inside, they set it on the floor and pushed it home. I could hear the rough pine shuffling across the floor.

“You’re late.” Mama struggled with the box.

“Don’t start with me, Cathy,” the woman said, and Lenore looked up, and so did I. No one, except Grandfather before he died, dared call Mama “Cathy.” To everyone, except for me, she was always “Doctor.” But Mama did not bristle and did not correct, as she would have with anyone else.

“Word was you’d be here at midnight.”

“We couldn’t leave any earlier,” the woman said. “He wasn’t ready.”

The woman knelt down in her dusty skirts, and drew a long, skinny claw hammer from the handbag. She turned it on its head and began to pull at the nails on the coffin’s face. She grunted, “Here, Lucien,” and signaled to the boy. “Put some grease into it.” He fell down beside her, took the hammer from her hands, and began to pull at the nails she’d left behind.

Mama watched, eagerly. We all did. I crossed the room to stand beside her, slipped my hand into hers. Mama started at my touch. “If you’d only come later.”

The woman’s head jerked up, her face sharp, and then she looked at my hand in Mama’s and her frown softened. “I know we’ve done it differently. This time we really tried,” she said. “Besides, my Lucien sees all this and more. If you do this work, Cathy, your children will know sooner or later.”

Mama did not take advice from anyone, certainly not advice on me, but she said nothing at this softest of rebukes, only watched the woman and her son work.

The boy, Lucien, worked hard and when the final nail was out, he and Lenore pulled at the splintering plank until it gave a terrible yawn and then

a man curled in on himself like a dried mulberry leaf

his skin gray his eyes open and staring

his pants damp he smelled sharp

like the brandy Lenore used to cut Mama’s medicines

The woman gasped and reached for the boy and held him close. Lenore gasped too. Mama let go of my hand and knelt down at the side of the coffin. She held her ear over the man’s open mouth and her eyes went blank, that look she always got when she left this world, entered the one of her mind.

She stood up suddenly. “The arnica, please,” she said to Lenore, who hurried over to the shelf over Mama’s work table.

Lenore held the big glass jar close to her chest, then set it down beside the coffin. Without looking at her, never taking her eyes off the dead man, Mama only held out her right hand.

“Thirty grains,” she said. “Exactly. Don’t skimp me, girl.”

Lenore counted them out,

one two three

I watched the yellow pellets move from the glass to Mama’s open palm. Mama wet the fingers of her free hand with her own spit, the better to gain purchase, and then pinched each, one by one, from her right palm and fed them into the dead man’s mouth.

fifteen sixteen seventeen

“He wasn’t like that when we put him in, Cathy,” the woman said. Lucien turned his face into her side and I felt a flash of pride, that a boy bigger than me couldn’t watch what I could.

twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three

Thirty seeds passed between his lips.

The last five left them yellow.

Mama stood up. The man lay still in his coffin. Mama put her hands on her hips, frowned. Then she knelt down suddenly and whacked his back. The man sputtered and coughed and made the lowest moaning sound. His eyes blinked and he rolled them up to look at all of us from his resting place.

“There,” Mama said.

The woman sighed. “Cathy, I don’t know what we would have done—”

“Well, we don’t have to wonder.” Mama wiped her hands on her skirt. The man in the coffin was still groaning.

“He was so eager to keep going,” the woman said. “He and his sister came to us three days ago. He said he should leave before his sister. That he was strong enough to make it first. But when he saw how he had to come, he got scared. He was shaking something fierce.”

“I told him, ‘Me and Mamman took a girl not but ten years old this way and she was brave and didn’t cry the whole time,’” Lucien said. He was much recovered now and had stepped away from his mother’s side. “I said, ‘Be brave, Mr. Ben.’”

“Last night, he disappeared,” the woman said. “That’s why we left at the wrong time. He went missing and almost killed us all. He was down in Market Square, begging for whiskey to help him through. I said, ‘you fool’, but he was already drunk by the time he got back. Pierre told me to wait till he sobered up, but if we’d done that, he would have kept yelling, drawing even more attention to us. It took Pierre and Lucien both to get him in the box and the whole time he was hollering that we were trying to kill him. He kept saying ‘Damn, Nigger, what’d I ever do to you?’”

Mama started to laugh but caught herself. Instead she said, “How did you get him to be quiet?”

“I soaked that rag in some laudanum and stuffed it in his mouth and then he fell right still. When we nailed the top on, I swear he was still breathing.”

Mama shook her head. “You always overdo it, Elizabeth,” she said, and then we all heard a great whoosh, as Mr. Ben sat up in his coffin and began to cry.

“That black bitch right there promised to get me out. They all said she can get you out. No one ever said it was like this. In a goddamn coffin.” Mr. Ben was upright and I could see him clearly. The color came back to him—his skin was a dark brown. I liked his face. It was soft and I thought handsome, made more so by his cheeks and chin. They rounded into the pout of a spoiled and much loved baby. I could not tell how old he was—his skin was smooth but his hair, what was left of it, was turning gray and clipped close to his skull. He wore a homespun shirt and britches and no hat. His hands were enormous and calloused. He was crying, loud, wracking sobs that I did not think a grown person could make. He made no move to leave his coffin and my mother and the woman made no move to comfort him.

The woman said, “Behave yourself, Mr. Ben.”

Mama pursed her lips. “Is this his final destination?”

“We take his sister to Manhattan next month.”

“Then perhaps Mr. Ben can wait for her there. Mr. Ben,” Mama said, “you will have to stay the night here, but I trust we can count on you to be quiet?”

Mr. Ben did not look at her, instead gazed up at the ceiling. “As long as I don’t ever have to sleep in any coffin.”

Mama laughed. “Only the good Lord can promise that.”

 

Mama had Lenore set up a bed for Mr. Ben by the fire, and she and the woman—Madame Elizabeth, she said to call her—took Mr. Ben by both elbows and helped him stand for the first time in twelve hours and walk around the room before settling down.

Mr. Ben went easily enough to sleep and Mama and Madame Elizabeth fell to talking.

I was too cowed to say anything to our visitors. With the other people Mama had come through the house—her patients and the runners from the pharmacy closer to town and all the women in the committees and societies and church groups Mama headed—I had been trained to make polite conversation and ask, “How do you do.” But Madame Elizabeth was different. She spoke to Mama as if we had not all just seen her raise a man from the dead. As if Mama was the same as she.

“Cathy,” she said when Mama stood over Lenore as she made up Mr. Ben’s cot, “you work this poor woman to death.”

As they talked, I did not dare to interrupt them. I did not want to be sent away to bed. Mama brewed strong sassafras tea for both of them—they had seemed to agree, without ever speaking it aloud, that they would both stay up the night to make sure Mr. Ben made it. I sat very still and close to Mama, and the only way I was sure she had not forgotten me was when, after she finished her mug, she silently handed it to me because she knew that I believed that the sweetest drink in the world came from the dregs of a cup she had drunk from.

From their talking, I learned that Madame Elizabeth was a childhood friend of Mama’s. She had a husband whom she called “Monsieur Pierre”—“A Haitian Negro, so you know he’s unruly,” Madame Elizabeth said, and Mama laughed, “Oh, hush.” He and Madame Elizabeth ran a joint business down in Philadelphia—Madame Elizabeth ran a dressmaker’s shop on one side of the house and Monsieur Pierre an undertaker’s on the other.

“You are doing well?” Mama asked, and Madame Elizabeth stood up, stamping her feet so her skirt hung down straight.

“Well? Well? Look at this dress, Madame Doctor.” She turned. It was, indeed, a very fine dress. The lilies embroidered on the bodice stretched tendrils down to the skirt—a queer embellishment on a mourning dress that she clearly wore over many travels.

“You play too much,” Mama said. “A dress like that draws attention and that’s the last thing any of us need.”

“We’re doing the Lord’s work in a cruel world but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it with style,” Madame Elizabeth said.

Mama looked at the fire. “If we are found out because you insist on introducing yourself with an ostrich feather, I don’t know that I, or the Lord, can forgive you.”

“Well, ostrich feathers are déclassé.” Madame Elizabeth took the hem of her dress in her hand and artfully shook it. “Pierre always hated them and, lo and behold, the ladies say they’re no longer in fashion. So, nothing to worry about on that account.”

They fell into a practiced quarrel, one that must have been older than me, centered on Mama’s bad dress sense. Mama did not care for beauty, this was true. Like all the women in our town, she dressed for work, in heavy, dark-colored gowns that could bear the mark of other people’s sweat and tears and spit and vomit, never show the stain. But where others took care to tie a scarf at an angle or thread sweet grass through a shirt cuff, Mama did not care. She was not scraggly. She was always neat and on Sundays, she allowed for the vanity of a hat with a big sweeping brim, which was decorated with the same set of silk flowers she’d won in a church raffle before I was born. When one of the ladies’ groups she belonged to occasionally fell into giddy talk about the newest bolt of fabric or a new way of tying a head scarf, she would always quickly steer the conversation back to what was at hand. She would have been mortified to know it, but I had heard some of the women point to those same silk flowers on her hat that had not changed position for many seasons and call them more reliable than springtime.

Madame Elizabeth teased Mama about the cramped practicalities of their youth until finally she turned to me, the first she had acknowledged me since she came in.

“Do you think she was always this way?” She glanced sideways at my mother.

“You turn my own daughter against me?” Mama said, but she was laughing, really laughing, in a way I had not heard before.

“When we were girls at the Colored School,” Madame Elizabeth leaned in, her voice low, as if I was as old as she and Mama, “I used to be so terrible at arithmetic. But not her. She was the best at it. Oh, so quick! You’d think the devil was giving her notes.”

“Elizabeth!”

“But he wasn’t of course. She was just so smart, your mother, smarter than the devil, but good. But not all the way good. Can I tell you? Can I tell you a secret, my dear?”

“Don’t listen to her.” Mama went to cover my ears, but Madame Elizabeth drew me to her and held me close to her lap, and mock whispered, loud enough for Mama to hear.

“Do you know what your clever Mama would do? She’d ask me to dye her ribbons purple for her. Yes, even your good and smart Mama wanted a bit of purple ribbon. And me, being her bestest friend, being her kind Elizabeth, mashed up all the blackberries I could find and dyed those ribbons the prettiest purple anyone in Kings’ County had ever seen.”

“And extorted me and forced me to agree to do your arithmetic for you in exchange,” Mama said.

“But can you blame me?” Madame Elizabeth’s breath was so soft on my ear, I shivered. “Your Mama has always been the brightest.”

Madame Elizabeth stroked the plaits in my hair and ran her fingers over my brow. “Lord,” she said, “your girl may be dark, Cathy, but isn’t she pretty.”

“Liberty is beautiful,” Mama said, gazing happily at me, and I flushed warm, because Mama did not often comment on anyone’s appearance unless it was to note that their skin had gone jaundice or developed a rash.

“It’s a shame she got her father’s color,” Madame Elizabeth said, absently, and Mama stopped smiling.

“It’s a blessing,” she said, very distinctly, and Madame Elizabeth’s hand paused for a moment.

“You aren’t scared?” she said. She was stroking my face again. I did not want her to stop, but I could see from Mama’s face that she wished that she would. “This work grows more dangerous, you know. You are all right. You’re bright enough they hassle you less, maybe. But she’s not.”

Mama stood up abruptly. “It’s less dangerous work if your helpmates come to you at midnight, as promised, not dusk,” she said. She bent over Mr. Ben’s cot.

Madame Elizabeth let go of my face. “I told you why we missed our time,” she said.

But Mama didn’t answer. She held her palm over Mr. Ben’s open mouth.

“How is he?” Madame Elizabeth called.

“If he makes it through the next hour without any upset, he should be recovered.”

Madame Elizabeth looked over at her own son, Lucien, who had fallen asleep in Mama’s leather examination chair. Lucien, like Madame Elizabeth, had brassy velvet skin, and it was blushing now, in the last heat of the fire.

“Lucien’s a good-looking boy as well,” Madame Elizabeth glanced sideways at Mama. “Perhaps, one day, he and Liberty will make us proud and marry.”

Mama was still watching Mr. Ben, but she smiled. “And move my Liberty all the way to Philadelphia, away from me? I couldn’t bear that,” she said. But she was pleased, I could see, that Madame Elizabeth, even in jest, considered me worthy of her son.

“What did Mama do with the purple ribbons?” I asked, before I could stop myself. I cursed myself. Surely, now they would send me to bed. But Madame Elizabeth pulled me onto her lap.

“She wore them every day because she knew they looked so fine. She was wearing them the day she met your good and kind father. She only let me borrow them once, when I asked her because I was going to a lecture at the lyceum, and wouldn’t you know, it was there where I met my own good man, Monsieur Pierre. He was fresh from Haiti and I do believe meeting him is because of those lucky purple ribbons. Maybe she’ll let you wear them one day too, and you will tell us of finding your love with them.”

“Tall tales,” Mama said.

The rope on the cot whinnied as Mr. Ben turned over in his sleep. He began to cry. He was saying something, a word gargled by the bend of his neck. Mama gently lifted his head and he sighed. Then he shouted, “Daisy.”

“He certainly is giving us work,” Madame Elizabeth said.

“We grow too bold. You should not have taken him.”

“He insisted. In his state, it’s safer to keep him moving. Once his sister comes, she can take him on to Troy or Syracuse. Or Canada.”

“He won’t be safe till he’s out of this country. Even then, he will probably still be in danger,” Mama said.

Mr. Ben cried again. “Daisy.”

“His sister said that was his girl,” Madame Elizabeth said. “He took up with her and then she ran. They got word last spring she died. That’s what finally made him despair enough to leave, his sister said. She’d been trying to get him to work up the courage for forever. Their mother gone, brother gone, and then the girl he’d started to love for just a little bit of comfort, gone too. That’s why he’s here.”

“He’s running away, not running toward. They’re the most dangerous kind,” Mama said. “They have nothing to lose and so they grow reckless.”

“He won’t harm us though.”

“Let us hope,” Mama said. She did not sound convinced.

 

My mother named me Liberty for a dead man’s dream, the dream of my father, the only other dead man I knew, before Mama resurrected Mr. Ben.

My father died when I was still in Mama’s womb. He was a traveling preacher, and on one of his trips West, he fell ill. By the time he made it back to her, it was too late. Even Mama could not heal him. In his final moments, as he lay sweating his life away in her arms, he told her to name me Liberty, in honor of the bright, shining future he was sure was coming.

Papa was one of those who’d stolen themselves away and come up North. Did he come in one of Madame Elizabeth’s coffins? I do not know. Mama did not like to talk about him. His name was Robert. I know it only from tracing it on his gravestone with my own finger. He is buried in my mother’s family’s plot—he, of course, did not have people of his own up here. His gravestone reads “Robert Sampson” and then, underneath it, instead of the dates of his time on this earth, only the one word, “Freedom.”

Although Mama did not like to talk about my father, she did like me to take care of his grave. Every other Sunday, after church, we stopped in the burial place and washed down his stone and pulled up the weeds. One of the first presents she made me, when I was four or five, was a small pair of scissors to wear at my waist, so that I could trim the grass that grew over him. “It’s his home now,” was how she explained it to me when I was young. “We have to make it comfortable for him.”

Papa was the one dead man I knew, but I knew of a dead little girl too. My mama’s sister, also buried in the family plot, but her stone had no name and Mama wouldn’t tell it to me. Mama did not like to speak of her either. She was not a name, not a memory—just a white stone that only Mama was allowed to tend and a glass jar on the parlor’s mantelpiece, where Mama kept three braids clipped from her head right after she passed. The dead girl’s braids sat gathering dust in the bottom of the jar, curled in on each other like the newborn milk snakes we’d sometimes find asleep in the barn. I only learned how the little girl passed from Lenore, who told me one day, plain, while Mama was on a house call and had left me to help her wash the sheets.

As she beat the linen clean, Lenore said, “Pneumonia.” The dry cough racking the small, sweaty body, the muffled air, a painful way for a child to go. Back then, there was no colored doctor, man or woman, in the county. If you wanted to go to see one, you had to find a white person willing to accompany you—white doctors did not treat colored people, if we came alone. Grandfather was light enough. He could get by. But the little girl who passed, she couldn’t. She was too dark. They would have known her to be colored. They would not have taken her for white, as they would have if it was Grandfather, or Mama, who fell ill.

Grandfather had a white friend, a Mr. Hobson, who he sometimes chewed tobacco with. So he ran to him to see if he would accompany his daughter to the hospital. But when he reached Mr. Hobson, Mr. Hobson was playing cards and did not want to get up from the table, not yet. Hobson waited a hand, and then another, just to make sure, and by the time he had gotten up and gotten back to the house, my mother’s sister was gone.

“Your Mama became a doctor because she watched her sister die,” Lenore told me, matter of fact. And I think it is also why even though Mama could get by, she always made it clear she was a colored woman. They let her into the medical school, alongside two other white women, before they realized their mistake, though she was quick to point out she’d never deceived anyone, never claimed she wasn’t a Negro, always signed her real name and address. And then, of course, she married my father, who must have been dark, because I could never get by the way she could. But Mama saw that as a mark of honor, a point of pride for her Liberty. Almost as if she’d planned it.

I know that they met at a lecture. Maybe the same one where Madame Elizabeth met her Haitian? I never had the courage to ask. Mama only told me that the lecture was about the country being founded for us in Africa. It was a lecture about whether or not American Negroes should go. Should free men leave? Mama did not want to, I know that. I do know that my father always did. So I am named for his longing. As a girl, I did not realize what a great burden this was to bear. I was only grateful.

Where did father go? Where was he, since he was not here on Earth with me and Mama? Every other Sunday, I lay on my father’s grave and imagined that new place he’d journeyed to in death, freedom. In the muggy summertime, in the hot July sun, I imagined freedom was a cool, dark cave with water dripping down the walls—like the one where Jesus slept for three days. And in November, when the wind bit the tips of my fingers and turned them red, I imagined freedom was a wide, grassy field on a warm and cloudy day.

What did Father do now that he was dead? He went to more lectures. Since it was the only thing I knew about him, about how they met, I imagined that was freedom to him. In freedom he sat in the damp, cool cave or in the wide field in a pew like we had at church, only comfortable, and he closed his eyes and listened to learned men and women make the world anew with words. And at his side were two seats, one for Mama at his left and one for me at his right. I imagined when I died and made it to freedom, whenever that would be, I would have to spend eternity very politely pretending to like these lectures as much as Mama and Father did. It would be hard to do that forever, but Mama would be happy, at least, and I would have my father’s hand in mine, while I sat, slightly bored, but loved, in freedom.

 

We all slept in the examination room that night—me curled on Mama’s lap and Madame Elizabeth and Lucien collapsed on each other and Mr. Ben still in his cot.

I woke up first, a little before dawn, before Lenore had even made it to our house for the day. It was a strange experience, to be awake without Mama, but it gave me time to very carefully crawl down off her lap and creep across the floor and sit, hugging my knees, right by Mr. Ben’s pillow so I could get a better look at him. Mr. Ben was the first person I’d ever met who had been brought back from death and I watched him avidly for signs of what the land of the dead, what that freedom, had been like.

I saw where his lips were damp with spittle and I smelt the dried flowers on his breath from the arnica my mother had made him eat—she had forbidden him any more food or drink until the morning. And then I had the shock of him opening his eyes, very slowly, to stare back at me.

“I been awake for hours,” he said.

I nodded.

“You her girl?”

“She’s my Mama.”

He whistled. “She must’ve liked her niggers black to get a girl like you.”

I had heard worse before. It was the refrain of so many, when Mama and I walked in the street.

“Mama says I’m like a mulberry.”

“Yeah, you a pretty girl, no denying it. Just dark. Where your daddy at?”

“He’s dead.”

“So who else live here with you?”

“It’s just me and Mama and her nurse, Lenore, who comes every morning to help with the patients.”

He propped himself up on his elbow and winced. “Lord, I’m dizzy,” he said. He contemplated the ceiling for what felt like a long time, then he looked to the window that was just beginning to turn white with the rising sun. “She own all of this from doctoring? Just from doctoring?”

“Mama grew up in this house. Her daddy owned it. He was a pig farmer. We still have some of his hogs but we don’t raise ’em to sell anymore. You don’t know about his hogs? They used to be famous.” I warmed to the telling. What a change, what a delight to have a stranger in the house, someone who did not already know everything about me, as was usually the way with Mama’s visitors. “Grandfather was very religious and he taught every hog born under his care to bow its head in prayer before it ate at the trough. He’d say the Lord’s Prayer with ’em, Mama says. A few of the pigs here are old enough to still do it. Sometimes,” I leaned forward to share this secret with my new friend, “Sometimes, I say the Lord’s Prayer really loud when I’m feeding ’em to see which ones will bow. But they don’t listen to me like that.”

But this confidence was lost on Mr. Ben because he wasn’t listening. He was looking up, over my shoulder, and I turned to see that he was looking at Mama, who had stirred in her chair, who was watching Mr. Ben back.

“That’s enough, Liberty,” she said.

She stood up and stood over Mr. Ben. She was searching his face. On her face now was a familiar expression, one I had seen often enough in the examination room, and when I accompanied her on her house calls.

When Mama was diagnosing someone, when she was calculating how best to heal them, she got this look on her face. Her eyes emptied out and turned dark and her brow went completely smooth and she stared for a good three or four minutes. When she was in this state, she did not respond to anything—not a patient’s babbling, not the sound of the wind at the door, not the distraught mother saying “please, please, please,” not the cries of the baby who was too young to understand the failings of its own small body. Certainly not to me, the girl at her side holding her bag, watching her disappear from me and go deep into her own mind, where the right answer nearly always was. She’d leave me behind, leave us all behind, to commune with the perfection of her own intellect. And when she returned, it was with a resolve that was almost frightening to see.

It was sad and cold to be outside her caring. It had scared me as a smaller child, made me cry.

As consolation, Mama had explained that one day, I would join her when she left for her mind like that. That one day, I would be a doctor too, standing beside her, both our minds flying free while our bodies did the work, and we’d have a horse and carriage and a sign with gold letters on it that said “Dr. Sampson and Daughter” and wouldn’t that be nice, Liberty?

And that had been a kind of hollow comfort, when she left me behind for her calculations.

Mr. Ben was watching her now, “It feels like I’m dying. Am I gonna die?”

Mama’s eyes returned and she was back. “Not yet,” she said.

He propped himself up on his elbows. “This the worst pain I ever felt. I was whupped till my back was ribbons when I was a younger man and I thought that was dying but this is different. It feels like there’s a hole in me, in the very center of me, and the wind’s running through it.”

Mama sat back. “That’s a problem of the spirit.”

“So medicine women are supposed to fix that.”

“I’m a trained doctor,” Mama said, straightening up. “I fix the body. The spirit can tell me what’s wrong with the body sometimes. But what you are describing—you can talk to Reverend Harlan at the church about the spirit.”

“Seems you should be able to do it all.”

I did not think, then, that Mama was even listening. If she had heard it, I was sure she had discounted it, because all she said was, “You will stay here to rest.”

The next morning, it took Mama and Madame Elizabeth and Lucien struggling to lift the empty coffin back onto the wagon bed, it was so unwieldly. Finally, they slid it home.

Madame Elizabeth was just taking up the whip to prod the mule when Mama seized her friend’s hand and kissed the knuckles where they wrapped around the switch.

Madame Elizabeth looked startled. Lucien smirked—oh, how I hated him for that.

For Mama looked genuinely pained. “If you should run into any trouble—” she said.

“We won’t,” Madame Elizabeth said.

“But if you should…” She held her friend’s hand for a beat more, then flung it away from her. “Be safe.”

Mr. Ben had come outside for this last bit. He bent his head slightly in the wagon’s direction. “Thanks, Mam’zelle,” he said, with slight mockery, to which Madame Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

Then she called to the mule and they were on their way.

Mama stayed to watch them go. Mr. Ben stood beside her.

“Y’all ain’t afraid of getting caught?” he said.

“She’s very good at what she does.”

Mr. Ben sniffed. “When she’s not trying to murder a man.”

Mama glanced at me, then looked back to the road, where the wagon moved slowly away from us. “You made it here well enough.”

“Back in Maryland,” Mr Ben said, “where I was before,” he looked down at his hands, “Before I was sold the first time, there was a group of niggers like you gals. They did what you doing. They got fifteen out. And then they was caught. You don’t want to hear what happened when they got caught.”

Mama glanced again at me, then back at Mr. Ben. “We most certainly do not,” she said.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Blood—” Mr. Ben began, but Mama cut him off.

“That’s enough,” she said. “Mr. Ben, if you’re well enough to stand and well enough to talk, do you think you’re well enough to help us today?”

He sniffed again. “I suppose so.”

“Good,” Mama said. “The best way to help is to stay quiet and stay out of the way, then. Don’t let anybody who comes to the house see you yet.”

“Your neighbors don’t know you in this business? Mam’zelle Elizabeth told me she was bringing me to an all colored town.”

“We are,” Mama said. “You’ll settle well here. But it’s best if we allow people to truthfully say they thought you came here on your own. Generally, we take care of each other here. But I don’t want to put anyone into a position of lying for us. It’s too dangerous. Besides, you know as well as I do, Mr. Ben. Even with our own, you can’t trust everybody.”

He looked out over the yard again, to the barn and the squat crabapple tree, to the hog pen with the two pigs just now rising from the mud to wander, to Mama’s medicine garden and the small field that lay just beyond it, where we grew the vegetables for the kitchen, to all the things that I’d just told him she owned.

“I suppose that’s right,” he said. “Just because a person’s a nigger doesn’t mean they know the life you do.” Then he looked at Mama and stalked back into the house.

I slipped my hand into hers.

“What does he mean, Mama?”

“He has just suffered a great shock to his system and won’t make much sense for a while.”

“Because you and Madame Elizabeth got him free?”

She took her hand out of mine and knelt so that we could look each other in the eye. I did not like this at all. I preferred looking up at her, tilting my head back till all I saw was her chin. This was more frightening.

People said Mama was a beautiful woman but I think what they really meant was she was light enough to pass. She had large eyes, true, set deep in her skull, but they were more owl-like than anything else. She had a heavy brow, hooded, that made it look as though she was about to scowl, even when she was laughing. Her skin, of course, was pale but it was sallow. It was her one vanity, the only one she allowed me to witness anyways—she dried lily petals in the spring and ate them year round, to make the tone of her cheeks even. It was, up until this moment, the favorite secret we shared between us. I was the only one who saw her do it. Her nose was straight—I think this is what people meant when they called her beautiful—but it was severe and her lips were the only pretty thing about her, the same as mine, full and always resolving themselves into the shape of a rose. When I looked at her, I never saw my own face, and maybe that is why I found it so disturbing, these times when she’d kneel down to look me in the eye.

I preferred, at that age, to think of us as the same person. I was still young enough for that.

She knelt and looked me in the eye and said, “What did you say?”

“You got him free. You and Madame Elizabeth. You got him here to be free.”

She looked me steadily in the eye. Finally. “This is true.”

I expected her to stand again, but she did not. “You cannot repeat to anyone what you just said to me—”

“But why?”

“This is not a game, Liberty. What we did, what we are doing, is very dangerous. If you tell somebody, it would not end well for us. We would go to jail, Mr. Ben would go back to bondage and you and I would never see each other again. Do you understand?”

I did not, entirely. But to admit this would not please her, so I nodded.

She stood up and put her hand on her hip. She was not looking at me anymore, still at the dust road that Madame Elizabeth had left us on and Lenore had returned on to us. “I suppose it was inevitable,” she said.

“What does inevitable mean?”

“If you’re to join us in this work, Liberty, the first lesson is the one Lenore said. Don’t ask so many questions. Only listen and learn.”

 

This lesson did not appear to apply to Mr. Ben.

The whole day, all he did was question. “What’s that you’ve got going there, Miss Doctor? Lord, why does the house smell like greens gone bad? Y’all don’t stop at noon to eat? But I still don’t understand who pays you for all this work, because you know niggers ain’t got no money.”

Mama tried, politely, to answer his questions at first while Lenore flat-out ignored him from the start. It was not so bad in the morning, before patients and John Culver, the pharmacist’s son, came running for more supplies. Usually, in those hours, Mama and Lenore worked in a silent dance, the only sound being the fire crackling and the glass tops of the medicine jars shifting as they reached for this or that to make or measure.

But the silence of their work seemed to unnerve Mr. Ben, and any time the house began to quiet down, to start the quiet rhythms of women working, he was compelled to speak and break it.

“Does every woman in New York make a biscuit as dry as this,” he said, as he reached for his third one that morning.

At that point, Mama was only half listening.

“If my woman Daisy was still here,” Mr. Ben said, “she’d learn you. Even you, Miss Doctor. Whoever heard of a woman knowing how to make a pill but not a biscuit? It’s not natural. Daisy would learn you, though, if she was still with us. She was sweet like that. She was the type to learn you if you asked.”

Lenore looked up sharply. “Mr. Ben, you’re bothering the Doctor.”

And Mr. Ben said, “She can nurse and listen at the same time, can’t she?”

A few moments of silence. Then.

“Miss Doctor, this tea is weak,” he said.

Still no answer from Mama or Lenore, who had pointedly decided to ignore him.

“Miss Doctor,” he tried again, “why don’t you ever put on new ribbons? My Daisy always tried to make herself pretty, and she wasn’t half as rich or important as you. But she knew how to make herself look nice. If you thought of looking nice, then maybe you’ll find a man to come here and live with you. You’re not too old for all that, Miss Doctor.”

At that point, Lenore moved, as if she would show him the door, but Mama held up her hand to stay her. Mama took a deep breath and then she turned, a tight smile on her face.

“Mr. Ben, I do believe you have not seen the rest of our town. Liberty, take Mr. Ben for a walk.”

“Mama—”

“You said you wanted to be of service in our work. Well, be of service,” Mama said.

So I took Mr. Ben’s hand in my own and led him out into the afternoon sun. I went back for my cloak and heard, before Mama and Lenore saw me.

“Honestly, it’s a wonder how that Daisy woman got with him in the first place,” Lenore said and Mama laughed outright.

“When will he leave?”

“His sister will be here soon,” Mama said.

“It’s too much, Doctor.”

“We can bear it,” Mama said.

I took my coat and left.

 

We were the only house on our road to town—Grandfather had cleared the brush himself and tried to sell the lots along it to other colored men, but most men, if they were buying, wanted to live closer to the school and the church. So we were the only family on that road, and had the privilege of naming it after ourselves.

“Sampson Lane,” I told Mr. Ben, happily.

He nodded. He looked above us, where the tree canopy stretched, through which we could see the white sky of spring.

“It’s colder up here in New York,” he said. “I didn’t think a place could be colder than Philadelphia but Kings County has it beat.”

I did not feel right, talking badly about our town, but I also felt my own cheeks stinging in the bitter air and only nodded politely, not committing to my guest’s belief, trying to be a good hostess, which is what we learned in Sunday School.

Our house, and the road that led to it, were all on higher ground than the rest of our settlement, and as the path sloped down, as our feet began to angle to the earth, the ground became wetter, my own boots spotted in mud and Mr. Ben’s began to squelch, slightly, in the cold.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We will tell Mama and she will find better shoes for you.”

“She will, will she?” he said.

“You don’t like Mama,” I said. It had not occurred to me, up until then, that anybody, anyone colored anyways, could dislike my mother. I only saw people speak to her with respect, and even the sick children, who knew to be afraid when they saw a doctor, did not have dislike in their fear, only a kind of awe. So it was a revelation, to meet someone who disliked her, so strange that I did not even take it as a threat, only, in the way of children, as a new wonder to explore.

Mr. Ben did not deny it. He only kept walking, his shoes softly belching, until finally he said, “You always been free?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You ain’t never been a slave? Your Mama neither?”

“No,” I said.

He sighed. “They tell us over and over again, what’s not possible. White folks say this isn’t possible, this place isn’t possible. To see it and see that it’s real…it’s a glory but it’s…it’s…I wish my Daisy was still here to see it with me. She told me there were places like this. She said if she were ever free, she’d spend all day covered in silk and she’d paint her face pretty. I wish she was still alive to see it. She knew what she would do with freedom. It wasn’t man’s work she’d do with freedom. Not like your Mama. She knew better than that.”

Then he stopped, and was silent, and seemed to have gone away to another world too. Not the one where Mama went to figure out how to make a body work right, but somewhere else, probably with his Daisy in her silks. But in the moment, I decided to apply Mama’s new lesson for me, and not ask questions.

“This it?” Mr. Ben said. He looked around. “This it, then,” he repeated.

“We play over there,” I said, proudly, pointing to the other side of the church yard, where in the summertime a meadow always sprang up, that I and the other children liked to run through. In this new spring it was bare, but I tried to explain it to him, what the future glory would look like. “We run so hard there, you feel like you’re bursting.”

He did not look impressed.

“But I guess it’s all just mud now,” I trailed off.

A crow called above us, wheeled in the sky, and settled on the branch of the nearest tree, shaking a too new blossom loose.

Mr. Ben sniffed. “I couldn’t see what this place looked like on the way in. I could only hear what this town was like, when I was in that box.”

“What was it like?” I said. “In there?”

“Awful, gal. What kind of a question is that? What do you think it’s like, to be shut up in the dark with nothing but yourself?”

He made another turn, looked up at the sky again, which seemed too white and closing in around us.

I was seized with the wild desire for him to love our home as much as I did. He had said he was lonely for his Daisy, but maybe he was lonely because of being in the box, of having been so close to her in death, but then being snatched away to rise up. I knew part of making a guest feel comfortable was to introduce them to those they might have something in common with. That is what they taught us girls in deportment at the Sunday school, anyways. And he seemed to enjoy talking about the dead. So in a moment of desperation, I pointed to the church yard again.

“That’s where my Daddy is,” I said. “Mama’s sister too. They’re dead like your Daisy. Like you were. ’Cept Mama couldn’t bring them back. She did for you though,” I said, hoping he would understand.

He looked at me from the corner of his eye and smiled, slightly. “They all in there, then?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. I thought about it for a minute. “Not all of ’em though. Mama’s sister’s hair, it lives on the glass jar in the parlor. But all of my Daddy’s in there,” I said.

Mr. Ben nodded. He was quiet for a moment, and then he spit, in disgust, on the ground. “I don’t even know Daisy’s resting place.”

He limped to the middle of the crossroads, turning first in one direction, then the other. He looked up above him, again, at the sky. Then he said “Let’s go back to your mother’s,” and so we did.

He allowed me, though, the kindness of slipping my hand in his, as we walked back home.

 

Back home it was dinner, eaten in near silence as Mr. Ben seemed to be thinking still of our trip to town and Mama—she ate not for pleasure but for utility. She often said that if it was not for Lenore, I would not know good cookery at all. She seemed to notice that there was a sadness around Mr. Ben, because she said, at the end of a meal where the only talk was between our tin spoons scraping our plates, “Is everything all right, then?”

He looked up then at her, hard, for a minute. So hard Mama startled.

Then he looked back down at his plate and said only, “Yes, ma’am.”

It was my job to clear the table, to take everything to the basin of water Lenore always left, her last duty before the end of the day. So I did not hear how it started between them, only how it ended.

I had taken our plates, come back for the pitcher, when I saw Mr. Ben by the parlor mantelpiece, running his hand along it. Mama was still at the table. She had taken out her accounting ledger for the day. She was back in the world of her mind.

Mr. Ben ran his fingers along our family Bible that sat there, then over the little mirror in a gold frame Mama displayed, the bowl where Lenore put cut blossoms from the tulip tree outside. He skipped over the jar with the braids in it. His fingers ran over a pile of newsprint.

“What’s this?” he said.

Mama glanced up over the little greasy spectacles on her nose, narrowed her eyes. “Ah, that? That is our newspaper. They print it once a month. It has lots for sale, and news of the church and here—” Mama got up to stand beside Mr. Ben.

“I can’t cipher,” he said.

“Of course,” Mama said. “But, you see, there’s a primer in the back.”

She rustled the pages to the very end. She held her hand over the paper and read aloud the print there—“See? This part is words to learn. Free. Life. Live. Took. Love. Loves. Man. Now. Will. Thank. God. Work. Hard. House. Land. Made. Slaves.”

With each word she spoke, I saw him wince, as if the words had pricked his finger.

“And these,” Mama said, “are the sentences to learn. I am free and well. I will love God and Thank Him for it. And I must work Hard and Be Good and Get Me a House and Lot.”

“Work hard,” he said.

“Yes.”

It was quiet between them for a bit, only the fire crackling. Then Mr. Ben panted out, as if it was taking him great effort to do so, “There was a nigger back in Maryland who learned how to cipher. You wanna know how he learned, Miss Doctor?”

“How?”

“He took pot liquor fat and dipped pages of the Bible in ’em. Dipped in ’em till the pages was clear through. Greased the word and hid it underneath his hat and that clever, pretty nigger walked around with the Bible fat on his head and if any white men saw it, he wouldn’t know it as the Word of God. He’d only see some greasy, dirty papers on a nigger’s head and leave ’im be.”

“Well, that’s marvelous,” Mama said gravely. “That’s quite beautiful.”

“You think?” Mr. Ben sucked in a gulp of air, cleared his throat loudly. “I always thought it was a whole lot of work. But,” he pointed at the newspaper held between them, “We must work hard and be good even in freedom. That’s what you telling me. With rules like that, don’t it make you wonder what freedom’s for.”

He let his fingers run along the mantel, from the Bible, to the mirror, to the flowers and back again, skipping over the newsprint.

“You got so many pretty things, Miss Doctor,” he said. “Such pretty things. My Daisy was the same way. She kept three stones she’d found, pink ones, and a white one too. And a shell she’d found down by the wharf. She even had a mirror like this,” he held up the mirror and set it down again. “She wanted one something fierce. Course, she didn’t need one. My eyes were enough of a mirror for her, I told her. But she said no, she needed a mirror. To see herself. First thing she bought with the money from her market garden, even before she tried to save for freedom. She loved looking at herself in that thing. Sometimes I’d have to beg her to put it down so my Daisy would talk to me.

“Do you think someone like that belongs in freedom? I mean, if she’d lived to make it here. Do you think she would have been able to work hard and have her lot of land to earn her freedom, like that paper says?”

“We all work hard,” Mama said. “I do not follow what you mean, Mr. Ben.”

“I told you about my Daisy, didn’t I?” he said, still not looking at her. “She was almost as fair as you. No, fairer. And big brown eyes. And hair down her back in curls, when she let it out. Almost like,” he let his fingers run again along the mantelpiece, until they lit on the last thing he hadn’t touched. The jar with the braids coiled at the bottom.

His back was still toward Mama. When he picked up the jar, he didn’t see her flinch. But I did.

I moved to remind him, “Oh, you know what that is, Mr. Ben—” I began, but Mama shot me a look, so pained, I stopped my explanation.

“Her hair was almost like this, then,” he said. He held the jar up to better catch the dusty braids in the light.

“Nah,” he said, turning the jar around in his hands. “Daisy’s hair was finer.”

He set the jar back down and turned around. He was watching Mama’s face, carefully, as if tracking which way it might turn. “Who’d all that belong to, then?” he said.

Mama took her glasses off her nose so that she could see him more clearly. “My youngest sister,” she said. She cleared her throat. “It is a keepsake.”

“And what happened to her?” Mr. Ben said. “You lose her to the body or the spirit?”

Mama took in a sharp breath. She made a low, guttural sound, almost a wrenching. And then she looked quickly down at the newsprint in her hand. I could see her eyes moving back and forth, making some kind of calculation. I could see, in the fever of it, one eye wet and water. She looked up.

“I think,” Mama said, her voice entirely steady but her eyes dropping tears, “that we have come to an end with our time together, Mr. Ben. I think perhaps this is your last night here, and you should wait for your sister in town. The back room at Culver’s will have you. He takes in many of our new arrivals and—”

“So that’s it, then,” he said.

“Yes,” Mama said. “I believe it is.”

She turned to me, her cheeks wet, her voice deadly level. “Liberty, please make up Mr. Ben’s cot for him, make sure it’s comfortable for his last night here with us. I will be working in the examination room. Be quick, girl, we have a long day tomorrow.”

And then she gathered up her ledger in her arms and walked out of the room. Mr. Ben watched her go.

He would not look at me, only at the fire as I made his bed for him.

“Why did you go and do that?” I said, as I pulled the cot closer to the fire for him.

“Leave it alone, girl.”

When the bed was done, I stood beside it. I did not know exactly what I was waiting for, what I hoped I or he would say. I knew I should say something in defense of Mama. If Lenore was here, she would have loudly cursed Mr. Ben the whole time. But he looked at me with a sadness so deep, it startled me. I could not say anything to reprimand him. Instead, I stepped forward and hugged him, fiercely.

He smelled of fresh cut grass, up close. I had not expected that. He was still in my arms for a moment, and then he put his own arms around me once, a quick, tight squeeze, the tightest I’d ever known, the air squeezed out of my lungs. And then he let me go.