I am black but comely, I sang to him to make him laugh. He did, though he blushed, and it was another point of wonder, that about this my husband could be pious.

“You sing to me the poetry of nature, and I sing to you the poetry of God,” I said to him. Again, he looked shocked, and that was a pleasure, too, maybe the deepest one, after all these nights.

Behold, thou art fair, my love;

behold, thou art fair;

thou hast doves’ eyes.

Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant:        also our bed is green …

A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me;

he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts …

As the apple tree among the trees of the wood,

so is my beloved among the sons.

I sat down under his shadow with great delight,

and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

This is what I sang to him, the word of God all jumbled up, as I held the back of him in my hands, as I tasted his skin and flesh and muscle and bone.

My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my very self, my inside, opened up to him. I rose up to open to my beloved, is what I sang when I saw Emmanuel’s brow at my thigh, his head between my legs, his eyes closed, the only movement the ship and him.

He told me about all the plants discovered by man, and I sang back to him the fruits from God. I panted in his ear, “We are one, we are together, as you promised,” and I did not think of who I belonged to (my mother) before I belonged to him.

I spoke to him God’s poetry while he lay in me, the holy words which seemed to have spoken of us before all creation, all nature, all wrath.

Before I had left, Mama had given me a satchel with five bags of powders she had ground herself. “You do not have to be a slave to him in that way, at least,” she’d said. I had seen enough of her books, copied her columns of writings, to know that she gave this remedy to most of the women who passed through her clinic. The richer ones, she asked for payment; the poorer ones, she did not. And sometimes, a woman had had the course but came to Mama anyways, a few months later, her monthlies stopped and her middle thickening, and then Mama would shut the office door and I would hear the woman sob that Mama was fallible in this.

That would never be me, I thought giddily. My freedom with Emmanuel would come from children. We would build a nation out of each other. That was what we were traveling toward. And our new country needed citizens—babies, so many babies, so many beautiful brown babies, all fat and ready to fill a house.