It unsettles R. that I chose to build my house in the middle of the colored—he would say "section," I will write "community." He would rather I had built on some outskirt, someplace that wasn't yet a neighborhood to be known as white or colored. But I like to be able to walk places, to church, to the dry goods, to Beauty's.
Most days I cook. It gives me something to do. But we have a cook, Portia Dred. She chose the name from the stories I told her, from the books in my library. The Act of March 2, 1867, debated over many a joint of Mrs. Dred's beef, created three categories of voters for the state and the primary categories of guests for my table: Negroes loyal to the Union who had never been in jail and had lived in the state a year, preferably those who are making money; Yankees poured down from the North finally resident a year, preferably those minting money; and loyal white Southern citizens who had been here forever but were willing to lie and spout the "ironclad oath," preferably those who have hidden money.
I have two books of recipes, and most all the time I cook from them. Almost always if we eat alone. But yesterday I made Mammy's chicken croquettes and fresh smashed peas from memory.
I'm still deciding when and if I will return to Cotton Farm. She, Other, is still in residence there. If I go, I will have to share both the place and Mama with her. I am hoping for a letter saying Mammy's turned the corner.
R. doesn't see my thoughts. They are made too small by his own. He loves Mammy, but not when he thinks of her as my Mama; he loves her through Other. He doesn't choose to remember I have a mother. I choose to forgive R. for what cannot be expected of him.
When we moved into this house, he carried me in his arms through the door and up the stairs into the most beautiful bedroom I had ever seen. When he was making the bed mine, between kisses he said, "Forget everything before now." Over and over he said it. He kissed me so hard. It was the only time he ever begged me. He was on his knees, I was laying on the bed, and he said, "Don't bring your past into this house." But it's breaking in like a robber in the night, and he won't wake up to save me from it, and I don't know if he got a gun anymore would do it. Every day it gets harder to see why he can bring his history into my house, but I can't bring my past. And every day I'm more afraid of my past than I was the day before.
***
I asked Cook to make the supper. I will try hard to give him what he has begged for, for his sake and my own.
We were served at eight. We began with shrimp étouffé and ended with little pots de crème au chocolat. I wore my Turkish trousers. After dinner, when we were still seated at the dining table, R. tells me what he didn't tell me at noon.
There's a man coming through Atlanta he wants me to meet. I tell him it's not the time, and he smiles in relief. He thinks I'm protecting him from those who would distract him from grief. But then he says we really must have the dinner and I am the one to give it. He flatters me by claiming the superiority of my table—"Never one flavor too many, never one flavor too few"—and I like it. I reward him with an invitation to take a rest with me on the green velvet couch.
He pulls me to him, out of my chair into his lap. Then he waits. I trace his lips with the tip of one of my fingers, then I push the finger into his mouth. When I try to pull it out, his lips tug hard. The tug is familiar. It steadies me. He's looking at me differently now. What the difference is, I don't know. But I see it. He looks at me hard. I raise my eyebrows. I know better than to speak. He says nothing. He just kisses me and looks at my hand as if it was something foreign.
There's a low wide couch in my bedroom upholstered in green velvet. He loves it when I'm sweet to him on it. I feel it calling to us now. When I was young I would invite him by saying, "The morning dew is on the southern lawn," and he would laugh at the proper way I invited him to impropriety. I was barely out of my childhood, just fifteen, when he asked, "Is the little bird twittering in its nest?"
"You make it sound so pretty."
"If you could see what I see." He kissed the lips he could kiss and still let me keep up mumbling proper-sounding improprieties: "The morning dew is on the southern lawn."
There are certain things we do only on that couch. He calls it visiting the honeysuckle garden. When I was old enough to walk, they put a fan in my hand to shoo the flies off Lady. I seen children play. Colored and white—colored far from the house, in the fields. Other, everywhere, under tables, in her room. I had no place to play then. My body became my place to play. I became my own playing ground.
Afterward we lie on that couch and talk, his feet propped on my shoulders, my feet propped on his, and I feel braided together. We talk little things, plans for the week, plans for the month, when he will be out of town, how much money I need, how much is left in my account.
He put the heavy string of pearls around my neck. They didn't come from the jewelry store new; they came from the place where you sell things when you need money. A pawn shop. They hang so low, they spill between my breasts, like the foam on fast-running water, a stream of rough white water pouring down onto my belly. I took the edge of the loop that dipped toward my navel and pulled it over his head. We were both encircled in his gold-clasped loop.
Against the smooth gold whiteness of the pearls, the skin of his neck looked yellow, cross-hatched like a dusty yard across which chickens had scratched. He smiled, and there were more lines. I could smell tobacco, coffee, and the shrimp on his tongue. Sometimes I was shrimp and he was the shrimpy taste of me on his tongue. Sometimes he was a pirate and life was a still salty basin of water just off a strand of sand. Sometimes it feels good, sometimes feeling good is enough. Sometimes I don't remember nothing 'cept being a fresh boiled shrimp between his teeth, swallowed but not devoured in the hours when it seemed that I was born to be no more than a taste on his tongue.
I close my eyes but I don't fall asleep. I still have hunger.
When he thought I had fallen asleep, he tiptoed out of the room, down the front steps, and out the back door of the house he bought for me. He goes to sleep in what he calls his closet, a small apartment in one of the four hundred buildings that survived the fires of the war, a fine old address.
16
I have never forgiven Mammy for the hours I stood bare-breasted in the market in Charleston. I don't know how to forgive her and love myself. After the paste peace of forgetting, she calls to me and I remember. Forgetting is to forgiving as glass is to a diamond, mockingbird. If that golden ring turns brass, Daddy's going to buy you a looking glass, mockingbird.
Bits and pieces. It comes back to me that way. I had a dream last night I was a girl again. In my dreams I am a girl again. I am sent to the market with a heavy load of rice. A little of the rice seeps out. I notice a fine little trail behind me. I panic. I put down my burden, tie a knot in the hole. I am scared. I know I am not still carrying everything. I am exhausted. I lift my burden with grave trepidation and discover it is lighter. After that I started dropping things on purpose. Bits and pieces. Stuff to carry (a chair, a watch, a sack of rice). I unburden myself over the stretch of the time road, arriving at my destination empty.
I always wake up before I arrive, 'cause I know I'd be punished for losing stuff. Sometimes halfway through I put everything down, I untie the shawl, and search for something in the bundle, something both worthy of saving and within my ability to save. Something that's both light and valuable, something I can hold on to when I drop other things. But nothing small enough to carry seems valuable enough to save. I tie up the bundle and try again to carry it all, finding again that everything gets jettisoned along the way.
Last night the dream was different. The people who awaited my bundle—to whom my bundle belonged—were waiting. I could hear their voices just beyond the woods. My parcel was empty. It got colder, so I drew the shawl around me. I wanted to turn back, but I didn't know the way. I start down one road; it looks familiar. I start down another, then another. I return to the first, when I come across a little chair, the last thing I had jettisoned. I start
following bits and pieces back to where I had begun. I take the shawl from around my shoulders and begin to make again the package I had jettisoned, even as I shiver.
When I awoke from this dream, I made my way to Beauty's. I didn't dress first; I just threw on a wrapper and went. She was very deep into her cup. One of her girls shared it with her but vanished when I appeared. I told Beauty my dream. She asked me if I knew what it meant. I shook my head no. She took my hands in hers. She took a ring off of her finger; it was big and green like an emerald but it was what she called a peridot. That's how I knew about my earbobs. She slipped the ring on my finger. "I'm not going to tell you where it comes from. I'm just going to tell you that it's yours."
"Where was the ring when I was looking through the shawl?"
"On my hand."
"I can't take this."
"You can't take it, or steal it, or earn it. But I can gift it to you. You can't pour all your water on a table and then have a cup to drink. I'll be your cup."
The stoned weighed on my finger. A tiny slowness of hands. I kissed Beauty on the lips. She kissed me back, and a bit of her powder came off on my cheek. Her paint dabbed my lip. She wiped the stain off my mouth. "Your dream 'minds me of Hansel and Gretel."
"You the witch or the grandmother?"
Beauty looked surprised. "Baby, I'm Hansel."
Hansel play-acting grandma. I laughed all the way home, but my throat didn't tickle. I look after the girl what had just left. I didn't know much more about Beauty than these new girls did. I knew exactly what she was saying. Girls will be girls. The men would leave and we'd crawl into bed together like kittens, scratching, pawing, tumbling into sleep.
17
We were in Venice at the time of the revels before Lent. I went into the plaza wearing a mask and hood. I saw a pretty girl, dark skin, dark eyes. She smelled strong of fish and capers and fried artichokes. I kissed her for Beauty's sake. For Lady's sake. Behind the veil of the mask, in the old Jewish Quarter, I kissed her, kissed her, and didn't cry, because I know one day I will die. And I will not rise again.
18
I leave for Cotton Farm this afternoon. R. has hired a carriage to take me there. I can't go there in his. Cotton Farm. R. fought and tried to die in a Confederate uniform to save this place. I have tried to forget this, but I remember.
19
On the road to Cotton Farm, I carry the same copy of the same letter back to the farm as I carried away from it. It's been with me all these seventeen years.
It's a pissed bed on a cold night to read words on paper saying your name and a price, to read the letters that say you are owned, or to read words that say this one or that one will pay so much money for you to be recaptured. It be better never to read than to read that page with your name on it. There are not that many people who can read who have read those kind of words written about themselves, so you won't know it, won't be known, if I don't tell it. And I ain't gonna tell it, 'cause I don't want any more folks to know. After some of the things I've read, I know if God had loved me, I'd a been born blind. They say Harriet Tubman can't read a lick, and she the black Moses. If not reading didn't help her keep walking on water, surely reading, what there was for her to read, would have sunk her!
I copied it out. The letter Planter wrote. I couldn't read a word of it that day. I came to know what it said before I knew how to read it. It was not an easy text. I didn't come to know its meaning all at once. I had to study on it. First, I couldn't decipher some of the words; then I didn't know what some of the words meant, didn't know the deep meaning of some of the words I knew. When R. finished teaching me, I understood every syllable and I memorized all the sounds.
Dear Thomas,
I hope this letter finds you prospering. Around here, prices and cotton are high, trouble and weeds are low—and you've got rice on top of the cotton unless the malaria rolls through your parts as it does some years, leaving whole acres of slaves dead in the swamps—you should see a fine profit this year. I have a fancy girl I want to settle on you, at a price, a good price. Her name is Cindy.
This is a delicate situation, a delicate situation I know you will understand. The girl is no longer a child and she's getting in the way of our Mammy's work. A matter of divided loyalties. My eldest daughter adores her Mammy; she's beginning to find her Mammy's daughter tiresome. But I have a certain tender concern for this child. To put it clearly, I would not like to see someone who looked so much like my sainted mother ill-used in field or bed. I hope you will take her into your house as a lady's companion. Let her comb your lady's hair, let her wash your lady's silks, and when your son is married, she can be your wedding gift to the new bride and groom. Your boy is spirited and intelligent; he'll manage the thing right.
In her day to come, Cindy will be a trusted Mammy in your great house, which I know you will let your son and daughter-in-law inherit. I will sell you the girl for a dollar. In consideration of the low price I am asking and the value offered, please keep her in shoes and simple fabric for dresses. Feed her well and use her kindly. If you, or any of your sons, ever have a little bloom that needs planting out of the neighborhood, please write. In particular, I wouldn't mind settling a little of your eldest son's property (the progeny of my girl) on my place, if it's a convenience to you.
Twice I've been kilt by a man. Once was when I read Planter's words on paper. At the end of every day Planter counted his money, his acres, and his slaves. All that counted were the acres. And these are the acres to which I return.
20
It almost takes my breath away, Cotton Farm rising from the mists.
21
Mammy died two hours before I arrived. They say waiting on me to come kept her living so long. She was about sixty years old. Now I'm near to thirty and she'd be the age of the century when the war came. Sixty-five. 1865. I'm just writing sums because I don't know what to write and I don't want to think.
She expected me up to the end. She died sitting in a chair facing the door. She was rocking, watching the door when it opened. She croaked my name and didn't even bother to draw her last breath. She died with a look of triumph on her face and a sweet ham in her oven. She thought it was me. But it was just Miss Priss, wearing one of Other's cast-off dresses. Why she wanted to put it on, I don't know. The visiting colored preacher pronounced Mammy dead and took the ham home to his children. No one in the old house wanted to eat it.
I need to put down this pen and stop writing for me. I need to put down this pen and send a letter to R. before Other does. I want him to hear the news from me. Every time Mammy wrote to me, someone heard my news first. She had to tell somebody, and they had to write it down. I always hoped it was them that left out the words I wanted to hear. Them and not her. I want to lay down with the body. Drape me over the mass of her.
It's a long road from where I live to Cotton Farm. And every one I have driven it with is dead. Dead, with one remaining to be buried. I want to sop up the heat from her body.
22
Garlic walked with me to Mammy's room at the top of the stairs. He opened the door of what I remembered to be Other's room and said, simply, "It's hua's now." For a moment I thought he meant it was hers because she had died in it, or hers because she was laid out in it. As my eyes adjusted to the vanishing afternoon light, in the gloom of closed drapes, as Garlic closed the door between us, leaving me in and him out, I saw the gingham curtains, homespun upholstery, and rag rugs. I saw the few gewgaws and the many small labors: a quilt in the middle of being pieced together, a gown half-made, another rag rug on its way, and I knew Mammy lived in this room.
And she had died in it and would now be laid out in it.
Garlic closed the door and left me alone with her body. I crawled up in the bed and got closer than she would have let me get; closer than she ever let me get. I undressed her and put her into a clean white nightgown. Her huge belly, the white hair between. I looked at her belly and wondered how I had gotten into it and how I'd gotten ou
t of it. I wondered if I had felt strangled inside. I wondered if her love of bigness, the pleasure she took in being immense, had anything to do with a love of carrying me. I hoped that it did.
I wanted to yowl. But my mouth didn't open.
After what seemed like a long while, after it seemed I could never get up from that place, it seemed like I had to get out right then. Get out or be pulled into the grave. Like the angel of death had come and might confuse us. I arose from her bed and smoothed away my presence with my hands.
Across the room from the bed, facing the window, was a high-back chair. She had seen the avenue of trees leading up to Cotton Farm from that window. I slumped into the chair and watched the road as Mammy had watched. Only I didn't know who I was watching for.
I was just there a little while before I could no longer bear the silence or the pain; I willed myself to doze. I don't believe I had been out for two minutes when the door opened.
Other didn't see me. The chairback hid me. I couldn't see her either. But I heard. First she sniffled and cried. Then she whined. She lay her head on Mammy's chest and told Mammy her troubles, like Mammy cared. Like she was telling her to fetch a shawl. She didn't see me at all. Not Other.
Maybe I slumped down low in the chair because I knew she would come. Maybe I sought to hide myself so she might be revealed. Everyone at Twelve Slaves Strong as Trees knew the story of how Other threw herself and some kind of vase at Dreamy Gentleman and of how R. heard it because he was lying down on a couch unseen. It was the one story he told me about her. And I told it to the community. Strange how on the pillow you get them to tell you—not the things you want to hear, but the things that may kill you. It was on the pillow he told me his soldiering tales.
The Wind Done Gone Page 3
