I feel it is time to speak plainly. There is no reason not to anymore. I have tried, as your mother, to only speak to you the truth, to remain impartial, to have you grow up with a love as pure as justice. But what good has that done? You’ve still chosen the flesh, anyways. So let me be fleshy, here, with you, since it makes no difference.

I miss you more than I thought possible. It was different when you were gone to school, and I was sure you would be returned to me. But you have passed over into a divide where I do not believe you can ever come back fully. And I mourn your passing.

When your father died, I spent three weeks in bed. Nearly in bed. I was alone in the house—my own father had passed a year before. Reverend Harland came to see me only once. But when he came, I was sitting up in bed, my mouth open wide in a scream with no sound coming out. I scared him in my grief. The Reverend has never been a brave man. The only other person to come see me was Lenore, who came every few days to hold her hand over my open mouth, to make sure I was still breathing, and to bring biscuits, hard as stone, from some of the women at church.

I spoke to no one except you. I placed both hands on my stomach, and in the quiet of the house I cried to you about your father. How much I missed him. You’d quickened before he passed. I’d held his hand myself over you, where you tossed inside me and rippled the skin on my stomach like a wave.

So after he was gone, I lay in bed and watched you move inside me, even though I wished the whole world had stopped. In that house made still by death, I knew you would continue, at least. At least I would have Libertie.

Elizabeth would write to me of her great political awakening. I liked those letters because they burnt with the same passion your father had, for the world to be set right. Elizabeth was learning so much then—about how slaves really lived, about what our own lives would be like if we had not been born free. I am ashamed to say I had not thought of it before. Even with your father whispering revolution in my ear, I only thought of colored people as the most cursed race in the world. I thought we were merely unlucky. I thought it was a matter of luck. I had read the stories of daring escapes, heard the old ones speak, seen the haunted eyes of our newcomers, and was only glad it wasn’t me.