Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Author:Kaitlyn Greenidge [Greenidge, Kaitlyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

In those days, in Brooklyn, Tom Thumb weddings were all the rage.

The prettiest boy and the most docile girl of any Sunday school class would be chosen as the groom and bride. Churchwomen would spend weeks sewing a morning suit for the boy—silk and velvet cut down for a child’s shoulder span. For the girl, a veil and train made comically long, so that she would look even smaller and slighter when she walked to the altar. To act as the reverend, they would ask the child who loved to play the most—one who could ignore his classmates’ tears and keep the gag going with his comical sermon. People paid good money to see them, and to laugh at the children weeping at the altar, unsure if they’d just been yoked to their schoolyard nemesis for life.

This passion for children’s marriages came on us quick after the war. It was a celebration and an act of defiance and a joke—we could marry legally now, even though we knew our marriages were always real, whether the Constitution said it or not. So real a child could know it, too.

Louisa had insisted we add one to our benefit.

“It makes the children cry every time,” I said.

“We’ll sing ‘Ave Maria’ to drown out their tears,” Louisa said.

I looked to Experience, who shrugged. “They get to keep their costumes when it’s over, don’t they? Tears are a small price to pay for a new dress.”

I’d laughed. “You are both hard women.”

But I was not laughing while Louisa and Experience stayed at my mother’s house, preparing their voices for the performance, and I stood in the church, six little girls lined up in front of me, four of them already weeping.

I grabbed the hot hand of the girl closest to me. “That’s Caroline,” Miss Annie called as I pulled the girl out of the church, past the graveyard, to the copse of trees where Ben Daisy used to wait for his love.

Now the little girl Caroline stood before me in tears. “Stay here,” I ordered. I tried to be stern, but this only made her cry harder.

I knelt down and touched her shoulder. “You must know it’s just for play? You won’t really marry anyone. You just have to wear a pretty dress and walk down the aisle.” Then, “Look, look here.” I squeezed her hand once, then dropped it quickly and stepped ten paces away from her, until I was out of the trees, nearly to the graveyard’s gate.

“Watch me, Caroline,” I called. “This is all you have to do.”

And then I counted to myself—one, two, three—and took the exaggerated steps of a march to where Caroline, skeptical, stood in the shade. I held my head up and twisted my face into a grin, which, I realized, probably frightened her more.

“You walk and smile,” I said through clenched teeth. “Walk and smile, and then you get to the front and bow your head and wait, and when everyone claps, it’s over, and we give you sweets and flowers.

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