40
Where did I think I was going? Who did I think I was going to? I got a letter from the plantation—that's what it is really, not a cotton farm—in response to mine. Can I even remember who wrote it? Does it matter? None of them really write, so somebody said it to somebody who wrote it down. Then they send it to me. They don't want me. I'm not welcome. They say, "She still here." Other, they mean. "Mammy gone. Ain't no reason for you to come here now."
I know that; I got to laugh. Yeah. Now. Whoa. Garlic. Garlic doing what Garlic do, protect the place. I see it. If Other find me there, Other may fall in hate with the place. She may realize 'bout R. and me. May remember something about Lady and me. My slave fear falls in beside me. That old fear that should be getting old, turning brown and be easy to blow into the wind, is ever green like the earth is ever red. Garlic's scared, I'm scared, that old fear that what we love might be sold: Mamas, Daddys, children ... the place ... a dress ... anything we love.
It's an old confusion, people turning into things. When folks is gone (sold, dead, run-off), you got a corn husk doll, a walnut-shell ring, fingertips of dirt on the hem of a dress. It happened so much, maybe now things turn into people. The house, Tata—Garlic could hear it speak. All it contained of the brown lives it had eaten; it was a living thing. Garlic walks into the great hall of the house like R. pushes in between my thighs; his eyes scream, "Sugar walls, sugar walls." Everything sweats in the heat. Garlic won't permit anything that might provoke Other to sell the place. Won't put Cotton Farm at risk at all. It's his sacred place.
I come to see what I ain't seen before. Me on the place might taint it. Soon she'll come back to 'lanta, and I'll see what Garlic say then.
41
R. is involved in some kind of foreign currency exchange scheme. He came to know a good many foreign bankers during the war, when he was selling cotton on the foreign markets.
At home the pendulum seems to swing again, swinging away from the promise of real change: the change from little boys and little girls picking cotton to children reading and writing and wearing shoes and eating every day and one day getting to vote or getting to influence their father's or their brother's vote. It's like being pregnant. You are or you are not. A child has those things or does not. Conservative victories ended Congressional Reconstruction in Virginia before the state was admitted back into the Union—was it just last year? Was it 1870?
Reading or not, voting or not, these changes are small but necessary. They are the salt on the meat of our existence, eating or not, sheltered or not, living or not. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi—we're holding on to our votes there, even R.'s beloved South Carolina. When 1880 comes, I fear and he hopes, it will not look so very different for so very many from 1860.
But it will look different for me.
I want him to take me on a boat to Assisi or Florence, some place like that, some place I ain't seen, some place we could see together. Dublin, maybe. Dublin's good. I used to hear Planter talk about there. Or Egypt. I like it when he tells me Egyptian stories and calls me Cleopatra, except the snake bit her. Some folks say my house is a cross between Egyptian Revival and Charleston architecture. Some folks say my columns look like bundles of broomsticks. R. says they look just like bundles of papyrus reeds. I know I own three of Mr. Shakespeare's plays, Romeo and Juliet, Cleopatra, and Othello. Nurse reminded me of Mama. She didn't know who Juliet was and couldn't do nothing to protect her, really.
I asked him this morning at breakfast; he says I must wait.
I'm tired of reading and writing and cooking two meals when I don't have Cook in. I have a little business. From the money R. gives me, sometimes I make little loans to the freemen. They pay me back. I made a loan today. Other has a business. Beauty has a business. Other got men working for her; Beauty's got gals. Me, I got R., but R.'s done working. Now, he invests and sometimes it looks like he's chasing respectability the way he used to chase money, and sometimes it looks like he's chasing power.
Some of the freemen I loan money to come from Cotton Farm. Everybody say Other feeling Mammy's death hard. She doing poorly. Her beauty just about drained from her. I think that's the reason she doesn't come back to town. I look in the mirror and wonder if the same thing has happened to me and I stay blind to it. It is one of the good things about being colored—we don't show our age until all at once, all of a sudden, we need to. Then we get fat and old quick, quick enough to keep away those we need to keep away. I've heard R. talk about it. The orthodox ladies shave their heads and the yellow nigger girls get fat. Either way, only their own man wants them.
R. loves the old ways of Savannah and Charleston and N'awlins; only these cities are old enough for him now. I used to be his exotic adventure, and now it is I who is old and familiar. Other is just a reminder of the dearly departed. He takes me in his arms like a child now, and I know he can see his little girl's smile on my face. Planter's smile. I wonder if that is why he turns away from me.
42
R. brought me a ring back from Charleston. As if we could marry before they divorce. As if everyone will forget he was a war profiteer before he was a blockade buster; as if I can forget he was a Confederate soldier.
The ring sits on my finger gold and green. And I can't help liking it, because it looks like something Other would have liked. If I die and he gave the ring to her, she would wear this emerald never even knowing it had been on my finger. Some things are so pretty, you wear them even when you know where they've been. Most times, most folks, you just don't know.
I say the ring is perfect. The stone is perfect. R. says when you looking to see if you got a real jewel, you look for the flaws. I don't know what he's talking about. Sometimes he just talks.
I wonder where we would be married. In my little gray African Methodist Episcopal church, Bethel, or in his big white plain Episcopal one?
L. P. Grant gave the land for the "African church" before I was born. After the war he claimed he "never gave the lot for free negroes to worship on, but for slaves." He wanted his land back. In the end, Bethel got Grant's land and Grant's anger. He loved the little black congregation enough to give it the land, but he hated when it asserted its independence from the white Southern Methodist Church. But then again, it was prominent white citizens who pressed Grant to let Bethel keep his land.
I wonder what preacher we could ask. "I will not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments," R. said. He said and I couldn't help thinking, "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sung." Where is that from? All these bits and pieces of "edjumacation" I have sewn together in my mind to make me a crazy quilt. I wrap it 'round me and I am not cold, but I'm shamed into shivering by the awkward ways of my own construction. All the different ways of talking English I throw together like a salad and dine greedily in my mongrel tongue.
Still, I wear the ring, and my hand sparkles when I wiggle my fingers. I lift my hand and wiggle my fingers. I follow my fingers with my eyes. I look at my pretty fingers and feel like a baby in a basket wiggling her toes, giggling to see them. I wiggle my fingers and watch. I am the actress and the audience. I am complete in my admiration of my performance. I applaud myself privately with these fingers in my bird's nest.
Sometimes you got to celebrate yourself.
Once it was only his hand that pleasured me. Those were sweet years, a time I sought to lose myself in him. It took a white-hot grown-man flame to distract me from little-girl pain. He did that for me. And I remember it.
I looked into his face tonight and it promised the face that was not there. It came to the front of my mind what I was looking for. The front of my head feels like a house, and the thoughts reside within different set places that I can rearrange like furniture, but mostly I don't. I come from a furniture-dodging tribe. We tiptoe around the pieces as they remain in place. I'm thinking that way again. Strange, the small things that make us proud.
43
We are going to Washington. The one old city I had forgotten. R. says he's t
aking me to walk through the halls of power, but I get gooseflesh like there's someone walking on my grave. I don't know much about Washington, but it kind of feels like walking into the belly of a beast. When I sleep tonight I hope I dream of Jonah and he looks like me.
44
If Atlanta is a city of wood, Washington is a city of brick. And it's not all so very old.
R.'s rented a house on 34th Street. It isn't far from the canal. The road is cobblestone and the sidewalks are red brick and the houses are real close together. They say the city is built on a swamp and you can't stay here in the summertime.
There are rich black families here.
They say the dusky Syphaxes are related to General Washington. There's a world of colored people here who were free before the war.
Other is writing him, imploring him to come back. His maid slips her letters to my maid, who slips the letters to me.
45
I saw the President's house. It looks like a wedding cake. I wonder if I'll ever go in. I wish I could ask R. directly. We went to see a play at the Ford's Theater. A woman's dress caught fire. Some of these new dyes are so dangerous. We are staying in the Willard Hotel while the inside of our house is painted. Julia Ward Howe wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" when she stayed here. She heard Union troops outside her window singing "John Brown's Body" and decided they needed something more serious. Me, I favor "John Brown's Body." What could be more serious than "moldering in the grave"? This morning we went to a little church across Lafayette Square from the President's house, St. Johns. It's painted bright yellow and has a dome.
Would R. take me, could we go, to the White House? He never tells me the rules, and I don't ask. I just see. Do they let Negroes in the front door? I wonder about the servants in the house. I hope they colored. The worst white folks in the world are the ones don't know any black folks at all—those up North with Irish maids.
46
Sweet day. R. had a touch of a cold, no fever, just a cough, but he didn't think it would be dignified to walk the halls of Congress hacking and spitting, so he canceled all his appointments and declared the day a Sabbath. Then he bathed, brushed, robed himself in striped silk, and spent it with me.
We played cards, whist, all afternoon, and all the cards seemed to fall my way. I feel lucky. Living in a hotel is like living in a tree, you are so far off the ground. I wonder how high up you have to be to get close to God. I wonder if anyone will ever design a place you can live as tall as the Washington Monument or, better still, as tall as the Washington Monument is going to be. If we are not living in the vicinity of God, I'm starting to think we are in the vicinity of low-flying angels.
There is a man staying in the hotel who is part of a delegation from Japan. He wants to know all about our home, the place where R. and I come from. In his lovely unlidded eyes, we are from the same place: "a plantation" in "the South." We are more alike each other than either of us is like him, more alike each other than either of us is like the people he knows from Boston. At least that's how it looks to him.
And this afternoon, with the cards falling my way, holding all four queens: the diamond, the heart, the spade, and the club; hearing R. laugh with pleasure at my triumph as I placed my cards so they made a loud little sound smacking the table; as he laughed and announced, "And possessing a king too, you need no aces"; as we ate lunch sent up from the hotel restaurant, and I tasted just how different the world was than I thought it would be, how much larger it is than I thought it was—everything, everyone, and every place that wasn't in our suite seemed unreal. We played another hand of cards, and I let R. win.
47
Hard news from home—Other's gone. Other's gone. And now R.'s gone too, gone to bury his wife. Bad things come in threes. First the baby, then Mammy, and now Other. I thought he'd cry, but he didn't.
Now we won't have to wait for a divorce. Or maybe not. He's leaving here, he's leaving me.
There's the funeral and her first two children, the boy and the girl. At the door when he left he said that the children were his by law and conscience. He told me the children would keep living in her house in Atlanta. He'd be moving an English nanny in with them. Later he would send them to boarding school.
Gone. Fell down the steps. First came smallpox. They say she looked in the mirror, then fell down the steps. They say she'd been drinking.
R. got a wire; that's how we knew.
48
I was invited to the home of Mr. Frederick Douglass today. I'm not sure if I should go. R.'s not back yet. It's been a while. I've heard almost nothing from him. Nothing literate—only what Beauty and some of the homefolk scribbled. It's like a code. A code I've got to break before I know anything. First deciphering the letters, then puzzling out how the words, contorted by spelling, read, then trying to decide what these words, put together as they are, mean. Letters from Cotton Farm, dashed across scraps of paper, make my eyes want to snap shut. Beauty's chicken scratches embalmed in stale clouds of her perfume ache my head, reminding me that she's with him and I ain't. Reminding me that she knew him before I did. Quiet as I might keep it, maybe I wouldn't care so much if she knows him after I know him—except that loving him is the only work I'm trained to do. I would cry if it wouldn't make my eyes red, if dabbing at them wouldn't etch little chicken scratch lines into my skin that say, "Death's coming and it's catching." That's what the lines on a lady's face spell, and every man can read it.
No chickens will walk across her face while she sleeps. She will remain in the garden of his mind, and in mine, an early summer rose, before a petal is dropped, almost sweet, light-scented. He will never see her grow old. Nothing more than that thickening of waist, a dropping and thinning of bosom that had already begun, and a slight thickening of her nose and reddening of her face. She will live forever, in some Charleston-in-late-summer-on-the-Battery garden of his mind, blooming forever, showered by sweet wine.
***
I don't drink. Not much. Lady slapped the first glass of wine right out of my hand. I was thirteen. She was fierce. "Do you want to look like Planter?" I had no idea in this world what she was talking about, but I was so tickled I almost wet myself. "His face gets redder and his nose gets thicker every drink he takes. It happens to the Irish, and it'll happen to you." Just like that she said it, then ran her fingers through my hair. It was the first time I had heard her speak aloud that I was Irish, that I was his. Always before it had been a known, unspoken thing. And the moment Lady spoke it, the truth seemed less true. I don't know why, and I wished it wasn't. But the moment she spoke it, my truth became less mine. As she ran her fingers through my hair, I could feel her pulling away from my body; I heard and felt the truth being snatched away from me. I didn't see anything, but she could see Planter in me. And every day it was easier to see more of him in me, because every day she was coming to see other things in me she didn't like. And the more she saw what she didn't like, the more she could see Planter in me.
She was deserting me in little minutes, with small gestures, a half-combed curl, an unproffered glass of milk, a cast-aside field flower. That was it. I felt like a favored doll that had been sat back on the shelf after years between the pillows and the covers, just because a big blue box with white satin ribbon had arrived one cake-day and a prettier doll with raven curls had been pulled from the tissue paper. What I really felt like was the weed I had lovingly pulled from the yard and presented to her, only to find it later cast aside, untreasured, desiccated. It's a thirst-provoking recognition, the sight of yourself abandoned. It's how I got the wine glass in my hand, and Lady slapped it out. And it wasn't the wine glass that got slapped out of my hand; it was her love for me.
49
I had forgotten all this, how much things were changing at home then. Folks around here always talk about before the war and after the war. But for me, looking back, I divide it between when Other still lived under my mother's skirts and when she didn't. There came a time when Other was moving beyond Mam
my, and that time cleaved our world.
Mammy still hacked a green apple clean in two with a wave of her kitchen knife, but when Other's little friends would come for a birthday, barbecue, or Christmas visit, she no longer cheerfully took them to Mammy's kitchen for play or for slices of apple dusted with cinnamon. No more did Mammy sit up and rock and scold in the room while the golden girls gossiped. Other's friends grew too old for Mammy to slap on the bottom and push into a room. They wanted baths drawn, darker hair combed, and dresses pressed. Without thought or malice, they ordered Mammy to perform these services. Other and I both watched this. We both heard the high-pitched, singsong, acid-sweet demands. It wounded us both, but it hurt her more.
Me, who had watched Other order Mama around all my life, was used to it. A beating you get regularly just don't hurt as much. Other was shamed for Mammy and she was scared for herself. All children live in a world of terrors. Cotton farms are scarier places than most. Smelling where the power lay, Other drew near the two muskiest people on the place—my mother and her father. Every single discovery of a weakness in my mother was another termite gnawing on the seasoned wood of her soul's foundation. And one day she kinda caved in. The day after that, she started building again.
If it was mine to speak over my sister's grave, I would remember this. First, she was afraid for Mammy—she hated the big blue life bruises Mammy suffered at the tiny hands of pale tyrants. She felt puny herself every time she was unable to protect Mammy. Then she hated Mammy for being hurt. When you can't protect a thing you love, it's natural to come to hate that thing a little bit more each and every time it's injured. Even if that thing is your Mammy's heart. Even if that thing is your daughter's body.
The Wind Done Gone Page 7
