Excerpt from Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Mama watched, eagerly. We all did. I crossed the room to stand beside her, slipped my hand into hers.

Mama started at my touch. "If you'd only come later."

The woman's head jerked up, her expression sharp, and then she looked at my hand in Mama's, and her frown softened.

"I know we've done it differently. This time we really tried," she said. "Besides, my Lucien sees all this and more. If you do this work, Cathy, your children will know sooner or later."

Mama did not take advice from anyone, certainly not advice on me, but she said nothing at this softest of rebukes, only watched the woman and her son.

The boy, Lucien, pulled hard, and when the final nail was out, he and Lenore pulled at the splintering plank until it gave a terrible yawn. And then I saw:

a man curled in on himself like a dried mulberry leaf,

his skin gray, his eyes open and staring,

his pants damp. He smelled sharp,

like the spirits Lenore used to cut Mama's medicines.

The woman gasped and reached for the boy and held him close. Lenore gasped, too. Mama let go of my hand and knelt down at the side of the coffin. She held her ear over the man's open mouth, and her eyes went blank, that look she always got when she left this world and entered the one of her mind.

She stood up suddenly. "The arnica, please," she said to Lenore, who hurried to the shelf over Mama's worktable.

Lenore held the big glass jar close to her chest, then set it down beside the coffin. Without looking at her, never taking her eyes off the dead man, Mama held out her right hand.

"Thirty grains," she said. "Exactly. Don't skimp me, girl."

Lenore counted them out.

One ... two ... three ...

I watched the yellow pellets move from the jar to Mama's open palm. Mama wet the fingers of her free hand with her spit, the better to gain purchase, and then pinched each grain, one by one, from her right palm and fed them into the dead man's mouth.

fifteen sixteen seventeen

"He wasn't like that when we put him in, Cathy," the woman said. Lucien turned his face into her side, and I felt a flash of pride, that a boy bigger than me couldn't watch what I could.

twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three

Thirty seeds passed between his lips.

The last five left them yellow.

Mama stood up. The man lay still in his coffin. Mama put her hands on her hips, frowned. Then she knelt down suddenly and whacked his back. The man sputtered and coughed and made the lowest moaning sound. His eyes blinked, and he rolled them up to look at all of us, from his resting place.

"There," Mama said.

The woman sighed. "Cathy, I don't know what we would have done—"

"Well, we don't have to wonder." Mama wiped her hands on her skirt. The man in the coffin was still groaning.

"He was so eager to keep going," the woman said. "He and his sister came to us three days ago. He said he should leave before his sister. That he was strong enough to make it first. But when he saw how he had to come, he got scared. He was shaking something fierce."

"I told him, 'Me and Manman took a girl not but ten years old this way, and she was brave and didn't cry the whole time,' " Lucien said. He was much recovered now and had stepped away from his mother's side. "I said, 'Be brave, Mr. Ben.' "

"Last night, he disappeared," the woman said. "That's why we left at the wrong time. He went missing and almost killed us all. He was down in Market Square, begging for whiskey to help him through. I said, 'You fool,' but he was already drunk by the time he got back. Pierre told me to wait till he sobered up, but if we'd done that, he would have kept yelling, drawing even more attention to us. It took Pierre and Lucien both to get him in the box, and the whole time he was hollering that we were trying to kill him. He kept saying 'Damn, nigger, what'd I ever do to you?' "

Excerpted from Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge. Copyright © 2021 by Kaitlyn Greenidge. Excerpted by permission of Algonquin Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.