When we left the rock pool, I was still shivering. Emmanuel walked ahead of me, his back strong and straight, his shirt soaked through. I could just make him out as the night reached up to hold us.

Manman Poul grate, grate jouk li jwenn zo grann li

Mother Hen scratched and scratched till she reached her grandmother’s bones

Libertie,

I was too angry to write again for a long time. I wrote you many letters and burnt each one, because Lenore said they were too harsh.

I am still angry, to think what I have lost and what has been ruined.

This is the life I had imagined for you. That we would have that coach with the gold lettering. That you would carry on my good deeds. That you would be my great act of love in the world and my redemption. My apology to your father for not understanding where he came from. My atonement to our people for failing them over and over and over again, when I couldn’t set them right.

You would be brilliant and set them right. But you are not even right within yourself, I think. And you cannot even understand what I had given you, all I had given you, to prepare you to fight.

They say the Negroes now are a different breed than in my day. The colored people are different. Bolder. And maybe that’s what you are. Not my daughter but a daughter of a different age. Maybe your boldness serves better for these times than my fidelity. Maybe my Libertie is really the clever one, and it is Mama who is the betrayer.

Write to me, Libertie dear, and set your mama straight. Give me your words, please. I cannot take your silence.

Love

Your

Mama

I never wrote her back, because I discovered on Fet Gede that I’d fallen pregnant. That morning, I woke up to the sound of the drums. The drumming was something I had grown used to—it came from the temples that dotted the road to the water basins, and oftentimes, as Emmanuel and I rode back in the dark, we could hear it echo around us, off the trees.

After Emmanuel told me his life’s work, I tried to do my best to make it my own. I had thought it was all poetry—though better poetry than what I’d written for Mama or the woman in the water, because it was inspired by love for me. But it wasn’t just poetry; it was the logic by which he governed his actions and his mind, and I told myself I must learn it if I belonged to him now.

I thought that it explained the long silences between him and his father. I looked at Ella and tried to see her with the compassion that Emmanuel did. Her heat-stiffened hair, her sweaty, pale skin, the way she looked with fear and anger at the women in the market. Love her. Love her. Love her for it, I told myself. But mercy is hard to cultivate, when it’s for a stranger who tells you you’re only as good as what’s between your legs and ignores you for hours on end.