64
I am trying to remember; but I don't know what I have forgotten. I wish I had run down the road alongside Other toward Mammy. I wish Other had got there first but Mammy kept looking down the road for me. I wish Other looked up to Mammy with pleading eyes. I wish I arrived at Mammy's knee. I wish Mammy bent over and lifted me from my feet. I wish Mammy kissed me as Other watched. I wish Mammy loved me and Other saw it.
But that's never going to happen. She's dead now. She's dead, and all I think about is not her and where she is and what she is now; I still think only of her and what I want and what I missed. Look at me this way. They always say we don't have family feelings. I hate proving them right. When I lived with the white people in Charleston, I used to cry out loud for my Mammy just so they wouldn't think I didn't care that I was torn away and stole. I wanted them to know I felt something. And I did feel something. Just not something for her. My cry was a lie.
I liked R. right from the first. He was good-looking and tender almost and he was funny in a biting way. And he could always see how strange life was, how it was what you loved that bit you, how it was the thing you lost and scrambled to find that killed you, how you were always doing the almost exact opposite of what you needed to do to be happy. He could laugh at the way life was folded, almost exactly on top of itself and upside down. He was, he is, a deeply and easily amused man who didn't think life meant anything, who wasn't afraid of God, or beholden to God, or grateful to God, or mad at God. He didn't seem to think at all on God and consequently didn't mind that God didn't think on him.
All of this drew me in like fresh clean water. I was so tired of talking to God. It was good to talk to R. He talked back, and he fucked, and he kissed. He was better than God; then he was my God. He taught me how to read and write, and it was as if he created me. I started writing and it was just like he took a rib from my chest and created a partner for me. Adam had Eve and I have pages. My pages are my Eve and they are my Cains and my Abels and the generations descended from Adam. I liked R.—sure enough. Liked him the way I liked God. I admired him and wanted things from him. I took my little petitions to him and they were answered.
I didn't start loving him until he saw Other. I didn't start loving him till he wanted her and me, but wanted me more. I didn't start loving him till he preferred me to her. Oh God, I loved him then. So much was reconciled for me in his reach for my nipple before her breast, my kiss before her breath, so much reconciled and so much redeemed, forever reconciled and forever redeemed.
And now it's coming unraveled. What if Mammy always loved me, and loved me more? What if Garlic was right? What if Lady was black and loved me and loved me more? What if I had never lost the first race? What does that do to the savor of the second? Why was I all the time looking over R.'s shoulder at the Congressman walking away from me? Why was the Congressman walking away with a dark lady? Why am I not considered the most beautiful woman in the Capital City? How much longer shall I stay here?
65
R. came to me last night and I could not move myself to turn toward him. In my mind I said, "Hand, reach to him"; in my mind I said, "Leg, raise up and drape on him." In my mind I moved to caress him in all my old ways, but my body didn't move. He waited for me as he sometimes does. I am twenty-nine years old. Or am I thirty-one? For fifteen years he has come to me quickly and directly or still and waiting. Never exchanging touch for touch as we did in my dreams. He touched me, or I touched him. Tonight he lay waiting, and I found no way to touch him. He closed his eyes and said to me, Et tu, Brute? Et tu? Then he told me the story and we were back to the days I was fifteen and he was just over thirty; he was young and I was younger; he was teacher and I was student; yes, he told me of Caesar and the friend who betrayed him, the last one to stab him, and we wrestled like bears in the bed, arms grabbing arms, rolling around in the bed, laughing, because this is what we loved, him teaching me, and me touching him. It was good for us, that. Good and gone, like the wind done gone.
66
The Congressman stopped by to discuss something with R. When I carried in a decanter, the Congressman seemed to be studying the angels dancing on the toe of his boot. He didn't meet my eye. R. smiled on me fondly and took the decanter from my hand. When the door was closed, I could hear R. laughing. If the Congressman made a sound, you couldn't hear it on my side of the door. I would have liked to stay and visit. But it wasn't mine to linger without invitation. I went upstairs and started sorting clothes, first mine, then his. Those are the jobs that remain to me, the ones that require discernment.
R. is having the house packed up. He wants to sail for Europe. London to begin. One of the colored girls from Nashville spoke to me of London. She sang there, or hoped to sing, for the Queen—is that how it was? Or had she already done it. Queen Victoria, who took sides against the slave trade, short and squat with lots of babies. I would like to see Buckingham Palace, and the Thames River, and the white cliffs of Dover again. I would like to see something more than the dark Mississippi or the lingering Potomac. He says we'll leave from New York. But I am not leaving for New York. I'm looking for the words to tell him that I wish to remain in the Capital City.
67
Soon it will be Easter. I like the preacher at my Washington church. I can walk to the church from our townhouse. He was enslaved in Mississippi. He came to Washington looking for a wife he had lost before the war. He had been sold down the river into Louisiana, but he heard his wife had made it into Georgia, then up into Washington, so he came here. Truly, it was not the wife he was looking for, but the children, who had gone with the wife. He loved him some children, that man did, loved him some children. Around Atlanta he tired of looking.
My Congressman has never been married. Rosie sews a little for his sister. Rosie says his sister "always be after him 'bout marryin'. 'Specially when dis young friend of hern come by. She ain't 'xactly a pretty girl, but they say she, Corinne, be real smart. She wear these round gold glasses and she got a neat-enough figure, just ain't much to it. But they say she went to Mount Holyoke, passin', for a year, and that's supposed to be somethin'. She graduated from Oberlin." Rosie says the Congressman say, "A man who can't protect a woman ought not get married." She say his sister say, "If you can't protect a woman, no colored man in this country can." The Congressman don't answer that. At least not so Rosie can hear. I'm wondering what his answer is.
After the war my preacher got baptized and came up to Washington. He's real easy on the eyes and not so hard on the conscience. The old ladies like it when he comes to call. I can't wait to hear him preach Easter Sunday. I'll wear my new hat.
68
I have had a life, and all of it is divided, but not like the newspapers up North say.
When I saw R. in his army uniform, it killed something in me. Even now, when he lies naked in my bed, why do I sometimes see those brass buttons on him, see them when I don't want to see them? Why do I touch the little knobs on his chest and pull them like pulling the brass off his jacket? When I see the brass on the jacket, why do I hear coins jangling in my father's pocket?
All Daddy counted was acres. All Other counted were the coins. All I count is the slaves, trying to get the number down to ought. Always ending up with one; sometimes it's Mammy and sometimes it's me. There always seems to be one of us who don't want to be free.
69
Things are not easy for my Congressman. There are Negroes in the Congress now and one or two in governors' mansions, but the tide is turning. R. doubts my Congressman will be re-elected. I fear he will lose his seat at my table as well as his seat in the Congress. If R. has no use for him, he'll find no place for him. It would be beyond the breadth of R.'s imagination or the length of his eyes to see our friendship. To give the devil his due, if R. saw our friendship he might stir a breath to protect it. He is not a man lacking in generosity. But you can't protect what you don't see. The Congressman will lose our house with his seat.
I didn't read the papers till I ca
me to this city. I have been a farm girl even when I was a farm girl living in town. All I knew were the people on our place, the land, the sky above, the crop, and dreams printed on paper and bound in leather covers. Here the dreams walk and talk, eat and spit. The world comes to me. Comes to my table for dinner, invites me to tea, sits by my pot while I drink my morning coffee. I who didn't know till days after the war had begun or until days after the war ended. Now I sit in the shadows of those making the news of the day.
Reconstruction has been under attack from the moment it was born. The Klan is on the rise and increases in its violence. No one knows how long we coloreds will keep the vote. The Freed Men's Bureau is overrun with people who can't read or write, who don't know how old they are or where they were born, but are looking for somebody—a wife, a mother—whose name they cannot spell, whose age they do not know, whose state of residence they do not know. These are the people I lend money to. I know the time and day I was born. Mammy made Lady write it down.
Lady told me that. When I traced her neat script with my finger, she quickly tripped along, "Your mother worried me from the moment you came, to get that inscribed in the Bible." Mammy wanted the day and the exact time. "I told her," Lady said, "I thought the day would do, but Mammy wanted the time, and we don't own the exact time anywhere here on this plantation."
I am twenty-nine years old. He is forty-six. I have no words to tell him that I am not traveling with him to London. I have lived under his roof almost half my life, and the only other people who have provided me a roof are dead. I will go to London with him.
Tonight when he lies beside me I will reach for him before he reaches for me. I have half my life before me, and I cannot afford for him to grow bored.
70
The trip to London has been postponed, indefinitely. We are leaving for Nashville! I will see Jeems. R. has some connections in that city. A maiden aunt with a bit of fortune and an awkward assemblage of hangers-on, threatening to bleed her whiter than she already is. Folk in Charleston think he should have gone as soon as possible, and the letter was delayed in the post, so he needs to leave already. He wants to travel light—without me, and this is a thing I would have accepted. It is our usual way for me to stay at home, stay in our little enclosed world, but coming to Washington has changed that, and I have no taste for staying put. He tells me that people will know I'm his mistress—if I go.
I tell him, "Everybody I know knows I'm your mistress. It's only some of your friends who don't know. And can that matter to you now? Now, you think on marryin' me?"
"Precisely, my dear," he says. "I can't take you as mistress where I may one day want to take you as wife."
I shake my head and insist. I would like to stamp my feet. I have no taste for being separated from him now. "Don't you have friends in the city with whom I can stay?" He doesn't seem to be giving it a thought. So I say, quietly, "Some of the old folk from Cotton Farm live in Nashville. Write to the family at Belle Meade. Ask them to let me stay in one of the old cabins. All things can be arranged between gentlemen."
"I am surprised you'd be willing to stay back in the cabins."
"Why? Lincoln freed the slaves. What do I have to worry about?"
"It's been a long time since you were in the cabins."
I let him pull me into his arms. "I'd do more than that for you."
He kisses my head and agrees to write the letter. "I feared you were succumbing to the charms of Washington," he says.
Hope of visiting Jeems makes me nostalgic for spacious, high-ceilinged rooms and lavish plaster embellishments. The outer doors, the front doors of Tata were six feet wide. When they were open, it was as if the side of the house had been taken down. We will take back this place, we will take back this place, a tree once grew where this dining room stands and will grow there again; we will take back this place, nature says as you move through the house; and it was Garlic who created the structure that said it.
Later, I take a nap and dream of Jeems.
71
The carriage ride to Belle Meade is not to be. Me be, we be, I am, we are sailing to London. We are sailing to London. I am and he is, the sail and the wind, and the old city. We are a whisper of wind seeking for London, a clean rag from the wash on a straight-up pole, pushing on to London. We are these new people who sail for pleasure. But the wind and the whisper and the rag are part of what I know, and the me in the other we, I am, fears. We are a sailed people. We sailed to America. We taste the path of our abduction in our tears. It's as if the house is on fire and I've got to get out quick.
Hate or fear of "crossing the water" may be the only thing I have left of my mother's, my grandmother's. Surely, it's the only thing that I have that I know I have. Maybe I have something else and I don't know it. If the fear were truly mine, I could touch it more intimately, get into its crevices, or let it get into mine, and I would know it. This feeling hangs down low in me, a heavy lump of an unexplored thing, like a clod of brown-red mud giving off some old mother heat.
The old aunt died before we could pack for Nashville. I long for forest. I yearn for the trees and the horses of Jeems, the steam from their nostrils and the steam from their fresh dung. I miss the safe inland cities. Nashville, Atlanta. These cities with their front porches on the ocean, Washington, Savannah, Charleston, scare me, like a door left open on a dark night with robbers about.
But I am hungry for the city on the Thames. I think of the palaces, Hampton Court where Queen Elizabeth lived, I think of the Tower of London and all the things I read about in those Walter Scott novels and those slow Jane Austen pages. The only one of those I ever loved at all was Mansfield Park. Fanny hated slavers. I think of all those ladies now because—why? Because—why? Because, having forgotten what I saw there, they are all I know of the world to which I am going. Dusty pages. Mouse supper.
72
I laughed so hard at breakfast, my insides got tickled. I laughed so good, I was the giggle and I was drunk on it too. I laughed so hard this morning my stomach hurt from stretching and shaking. The deep belly laugh cures more than you know that ails you. I had forgotten that. It's been so long since I had one. The rumble and the jiggle of the thing does a woman more good than a poke. But the good strong belly laugh is harder to come by than a good stiff poke.
Debt Chauffeur, that's my name for him now, wants to marry me. He asked me down on bended knee, and I would have been honored—except he wants us to live in London, and he wants me to live white. I crowed at that. I laughed so hard, and not a tear came. He couldn't understand it. I don't often think on how white I look; it's always been a question of how colored I feel, and I feel plenty colored. He said that no one in London will know that I'm supposed to be colored. And I said I am colored, colored black, the way I talk, the way I cook, the way I do most everything, and he said but you don't have to be. She was "black" and she didn't seem it, and she was not that much lighter than you, and she was "black."
At last that explained everything to him. I understood it near at once. It had never seemed before that he so little knew me. Always at least he knew the difference between her and me, and now he saw little difference, and the advantage was all to Other.
I tell him. Mammy is my mother. I think of her more as the days pass. I can't pass away from her. He says she's the one asked me to do it. I don't believe him, and he hands me another letter.
73
The script was ornate but the words were crude. I didn't recognize the handwriting. Before I read the contents I guessed the fine script belonged to some Confederate widow, a general's wife or daughter, who owed a favor to Lady and repaid it to Mammy. But what I read Mammy would never have dictated to any friend of Lady's. I suspect she came to Atlanta, came to Atlanta and didn't visit me, came to Atlanta and got someone from the Freed Men's Bureau to do her writing. I can hear her saying, "Git it 'xact. I ain't here fo' no about." Syllable and sound, the words were Mammy's.
Dear Sur,
You done already s
end one of mah chilrens back to me broke. Lak an itty bitty thang, a red robin, you done twist her soul lak da little neck and huah can't sang no mo'. She was mah Lamb, so I guess that how that goes.
Now you got mah chile. What was my vary own. Dat's a love child you got, Cinnamon. Skinny as stick, spicy and sweet. An eyes-wide-open-in-the-daylight child. She need a rang on her finger and some easy days, dat gal do. I had me the roof and the clothes, I watch huah Lady wear de jewels but Ah ain't neber cared nothing about dat. Ah done toted and tarried and twisted mah own few necks, but dis ain't about dat. Let mah child love you. And let Gawd love her too. For what I done for you little Precious. Yo' chile dat died. Marry mah little gal.
I am sincerely,
Her Mammy
Beneath the last two words Mammy had placed her mark, a cross in a circle.
74
I cried enough to ride back to Africa on a slide of tears. "Mah little gal"—what I wouldn't give to hear her speak those words I see on the paper; what I would not give does not exist. I want to eat the paper. I would give anything to hear her say "mah little gal." What am I writing? I would give everything to hear her say anything at all. I want Mama, I want my mother. I want Mammy. It's easy to want her, now that I know she wanted me. If I coulda wanted her when I didn't know she wanted me, she might be mine right now. She might be alive right now. Mammy never stood foot on London. Ah ain't goin' dere. I ain't goin' nowhere she ain't been. I'm staying here and looking for what's left of her.
The Wind Done Gone Page 11
