Libertie Quotes

“The only good poem I’ve ever written is you. A daughter is a poem. A daughter is a kind of psalm. You, in the world, responding to me, is the song I made. I cannot make another.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“I am not surprised by the cruelty, Mama," I said. "I am surprised we are expected to ignore it, to never mention it, to swim in it as if it's the oily, smelly harbor water the boys dive into by the wharves.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“There is a greater comfort in being unseen than being understood and dismissed.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“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.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“My rage at the world returned whenever I sat in that library. I knew what a stronger girl would do—sip her wrath like corn liquor, have it drench her ambition, sweat the rage out her pores as she worked harder and better, be smarter. But instead I suckled my anger like Lenore did the abandoned offspring of the barn cats, and it was about as effective as one of those little animals, doing nothing but mewling and flipping over in distress.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“Despite what Ben Daisy said about her love of cakes and sugar, I did not think a woman who could drown a man in her arms lived in anything as sweet as fresh water. Her domain was brackish. She would live in salt.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“Being a mother means being someone's God, if only briefly.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“When I sang with them, my whole history fell away. There was no past, no promised future, only the present of one sustained note. When we sang together, we three stood in a round so that we could see one another’s faces—and it was almost unbearable, to sing a song and watch Louisa’s face change slightly and Experience’s voice respond, and then my own, struggling for just a minute to reach theirs. When I sang with them, I entered something greater than my sorry, bitter self. I thought that anyone with a voice as powerful as that could teach me how to bend my anger to my will. I sat on that riverbank, and I thought that I had finally found my ambition. It was not to set bones right or to become my mother’s double. It was to befriend the both of them, to make them love me and sing to me for the rest of my life. I knew this was a silly wish, but in my discombobulation at Cunningham College, I did not stop to question it. I knew”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“I do not have a way with words, like you do.' She [Dr. Cathy Sampson] sighed. Then she said, very quietly, 'The only good poem I've ever written is you. A daughter is a poem. A daughter is a kind of psalm. You, in the world, responding to me, is the song I made. I cannot make another.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“But care, it is our lot now,” Mama was saying. “It is our service to others that defines us. We are doers of the Word.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“They moved together as they sang, and I thought they had found an escape from this world. I thought if I got as close as possible, I could maybe, escape too.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“I realized I had been raised up in something like a shroud, the muffling shroud of my mother’s grief -for my father and maybe for life.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“I have never in my life felt anything as powerful as whatever force was in that room while those women talked, and I began to believe that it was the talking itself that did it, that perhaps women’s voices in harmony were like some sort of flintstone sparking, or like the hot burst of air that comes through a window, billowing the curtains, before rain, I imagined the whole room lifting up from their talk— lifting up and spinning out, into the future times to come,when everyone would be truly free. The tine I thought we were all planning for.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“My mother's scrutiny was a burden. But this other way of looking, this besottedness, was just as damning. My mother expected great things and constant improvement. He seemed to believe in a perfection that existed apart from my actual self.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“At night, she no longer disappeared into the trees of her mind but, instead, had me sit across from her as she drilled me on the habits of all the plants in the garden, of the uses of the parts of tongues and ears, of the mechanics of a stomach and a lung. It was as if she had become scared that all bodies would sink, as Ben's had, and that my voice, naming the parts of anatomy, singing of bile and blood, could somehow keep them on the surface.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“If you listen closely, water, when it laps against the sides of a bucket, when it mouths a riverbed, sounds like hands clapping. It sounds like a congregation when prayers are done. But what is its message? It is not deliverance, I don't think. It is not salvation. It is something just underneath that, something that even Mama couldn't reach with her mind. So what hope was there for me of finding it?”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“And I decided when you were born that I would hide my heart from you, because I worried I would love you into nervous oblivion.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“There was only the beat of blood in my ears”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“When we sang together, we three stood in a round so that we could see one another’s faces—and it was almost unbearable, to sing a song and watch Louisa’s face change slightly and Experience’s voice respond, and then my own, struggling for just a minute to reach theirs.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“At the Gradys' that night, when Madeline Grady had pulled herself and her children and her husband into their bed a few feet from me, I lay on the stones that had been my resting place for nearly a year and pulled a stranger's cotton stocking up to my mouth and screamed the song I had been trying to sing, falsely, all these months. The song of my anger and my sadness, the song I knew I could never sing in front of the Graces- I did not want them to disown me. I sang it for myself only: a thin, high thing, ugly and satisfying. I sang till my throat was raw and dry, and white flashed before my eyes, till I was panting. And then I lay back on my stones and told myself I felt lighter.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“But there was no room for me there. Perhaps that was what I had been responding to in their voices all along- their desire. As wide as their desire was, it could not make room for me. I knew that. It was a bride song, a song for twin souls, for one mate to call to another. And I, a fool, had mistaken it for a call of federation. And so I was alone again. On the wrong side of a locked door. An interloper in what I had been so certain would someday be my country.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“I was not strong enough for this world, is what I meant, and it was a low-down, worrying thing to discover about yourself when all around you, men and women who had been beaten, scorned, burnt, drowned, still found a way to come to this silence and sit within it and answer questions about what a lung was good for. I began to think there must be something wrong with me: that I was slow or stupid, or merely ungrateful. Most of all, I felt a deep, burning shame in the center of my chest, that I could not work my rage better.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“A wife is like a horse. Laboring uphill with the weight of two people's love on her back.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“The world thinks you are mad. It's the greatest freedom I've ever known. Emmanuel gave that to me. I say whatever I wish to anyone. What colored woman in this world has that? No a one.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“It seemed such a lonely way to be twins, I thought. Emmanuel always faced out to a future he was sure he could dream into existence and Ella, always turned back to a past that had meaning only for her.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“If I burn her words, I will be free of whatever she wants of me. Instead I stuffed the papers back in my drawer.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“In the woman's dining room at Cunningham College, there was a big panel of fabric with green velvet leaves bordering a list stitched out in red thread. Three meters high.

Man is strong. Woman, beautiful. Man is daring and confident. Woman deferent and unassuming. Man is great in action. Woman in suffering. Man shines abroad. Woman at home. Man talks to convince. Woman to persuade and please. Man has a rugged heart. Woman a soft and tender one. Man prevents misery. Woman relieves it. Man has science. Woman tastes. Man has judgement. Woman sensibility. Man is a being of justice. Woman an angle of mercy. The first time I read it, I thought - then what is a man. I thought of my mother of course, and myself. I tried to parcel out where she lay on the fabric, but she was somewhere in-between. Men then for me, were still too terrifying to contemplate directly. The were an abstract.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“[…] and I thought perhaps we were back in the language of flirtation, with no place for truth.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“It was a question for the night, for the space of time held between two bodies in bed—the one place in this country, I was learning, where I could speak the truth. Emmanuel, too. (P. 233)”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“Being a mother means being someone’s god, if only briefly. (P. 321)”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie