You would not believe me now, but you were a happy baby. Your joy brought something back for me. You will see, when you have your own children—it is as if they are your new eyes and your new heart, and you feel sometimes you can live for a hundred years more, even after all the trouble you’ve seen. You actually want to live for a hundred years more, even knowing how cruel the world is.

Before you came, I stayed in this world out of a sense of duty only. It was my trust to fix it. I would get weary sometimes. I would think of what your father wanted—Liberia. I would think of what would happen if I had followed his desire to be there. Only a heavy sense of duty screwed my ankles down into Kings Country dirt.

But through you, I learned to love our land. I saw you learn to walk, first on the floors my own father had cut and sanded, then on the land that he owned. I saw you learn to talk by calling back to the birds in our trees. I saw when you cried, and I held you close. You would look over my shoulder at the hills around us to soothe yourself. I saw the land, my land, through your eyes, and I learned to love it again. And it was not a burden. None of it was a burden. You told me once, in anger, that you must be such a burden to me, and I tell you, Libertie, caring for you has been the greatest honor of my life.

But I think even now I have failed you, and I am full of sorrow.

Love

Your

Mama

Ti Me had handed me the letter without any expression. I was sitting with Ella in the parlor, and I’d made the mistake of reading it in front of her. I felt her eyes on me, avidly watching, and I felt my skin become hot.

“Good news?” she said when I was done.

“My mother is well,” I said.

And then I crushed the letter into a ball and held my hand in a fist until I could go to my room, my husband’s and mine, and stuff it in the desk drawer there.

As if that could save me from it.

I will write her back tomorrow, I told myself.

But then I thought of what I would tell her.

The children here have made up a mocking song about me. Emmanuel’s father did not even know we were married. His sister hates the sight of me. I spend my days surrounded by people, alone. This is what I have chosen, instead of speaking honestly, “fleshly,” as you say, to you, Mama, and fighting to stay by your side.

“Emmanuel,” I whispered in his ear that night. “Take me away from here tomorrow.”