The Wind Done Gone Read online

  As I continued to fan and the guests continued to eat, Other appeared at the table, and the wallpaper began to move. In my dream, just as in life, the dining room wallpaper is painted all over with the story of Telemachus, in the land of the enchantress Calypso, searching for his father, Odysseus. Garlic once told me he had seen paper just like it in the home of President Jackson. I didn't believe him. Presidents don't invite folk like Planter to dinner. At eleven I'd seen enough of "the quality" to know that. But I liked his story. And in life I liked the wallpaper. In my dream it wouldn't stop moving, and I started to hate it. Didn't I know what it was like to live in the land of an enchantress and to long for your father?

  My eyes turned from the wallpaper to the windows, my arm still pulling, still fanning. There were many windows. The house was built to let the outside in, the fragrance of peach and plum, the outside light after it is tinted by the colored glass of the windows. But I am inside looking out, toward the distant cabins.

  Through the pink glass I see black smoke from a cabin chimney. I see into the cabin itself: I see a baby gently rocked in the arms of her mother.

  I am still fanning as my mother serves Other a choice piece of dark meat. There is a painted porcelain bonbon dish on the sideboard behind them. It falls from the sideboard and shatters. Over and over it falls. And I keep fanning.

  I wake up screaming. R. says, Strong meat tastes sweet.

  9

  If I go back there, I'm going to get my Daddy's watch and have it engraved to read, TO R.B. FROM M.E. I don't feel like laughing, but I can just see R. laughing at my joke. I can just see him open the satin-lined leather box. He'll understand; he expects me to play with letters. He taught me how to read in bed. I praised him for it. His stomach was my first paper, lip rouge was my pencil, and the cleaning rag was my tongue. We learned me well. R. gave me the tools. I learned to write, right on his belly.

  He's used to buying women and ladies and buying them jewelry. I'm going to give him some of his own back. I like to give R. things. I like to give him what he's used to paying for.

  Sometimes when we are in bed and he's sucking on one of my breast, pulling hard and steady so the pull only brings me the pleasure, sometimes when he's nursing on me, I smile, because he can't get what he wants here. I'm dry. But I let him suck himself to sleep. And sometimes there comes over his face a look of peace. Sometimes when I'm riding astride him and my gals dangle toward his face, he snaps at them like the foxes snapping at grapes dangling just above their mouths, and I laugh. Once, just after that, he pushed so hard into me that something broke inside and we were touching without anything between us, like a fever came over me, and he had the same sickness. Then I closed my eyes and I saw Other.

  She was old enough to walk. She walked right past me, past Lady, she walked right past Lady and me, over to Mammy, reached up for Mammy, and my Mama reached down to pull Other up onto her hip. Other reached into the top of Mammy's dress and pulled out my mother's breast. "I want some titty-tip," she said, and I ached in some place I didn't know I had, where my heart should have been but wasn't. I've come to believe that was the very first time I ever felt my soul, and it was having a spasm. It clinched again, pushing the air out of me in a hiccup. I flushed in a rage of possession as those little white hands drew the nipple toward the little pink mouth, then clasped on.

  I turned to see the delicate Lady. She was clutching at her cinched waist and staggering back. I ran toward her; she steadied herself, using my head as a kind of crutch or prop. I started fanning the flies off her and I kept fanning.

  Wasn't it then Planter walked out on the whitewashed porch and smiled? Did he say, "My peculiar heaven, my peculiar, particular heaven"? I believe that's what he said. That's what he says when I remember it. His frail wife near faints and is fanned by the fairest of pretty pickaninnies, M.E., and he's pronouncing, "My peculiar heaven."

  The rosebud mouth attached to the black moon in the brown breast, the curving back of the loving woman lifting the child to her pleasures, as the child, awake, untouched by stays and hoops, stands on tippy-toe to get her fill of pleasure, all raven-haired and unashamed of hunger. Him laughed. For his first-born daughter the pangs of hunger were as delightful as a mosquito bite, something to scratch in the next moment, the promise of pleasure to come.

  He didn't see me hiding behind Lady's skirts or see the look Mammy gave me over Other's head. Planter only saw his daughter taking pleasure where he himself had done.

  10

  Now I'm grown, I wonder what Lady saw. She was just the oldest child on the porch, seventeen, with a three-year-old daughter. Never certain of feeding, I did not welcome hunger. I looked and wanted to suck; Lady looked and wanted to suckle-feed. We were both envious.

  Later, when it looked like the four o'clock flowers opened their faces to the sun, but really when they smiled their relief to the arriving shade, when the baby of the house, Other, slept on a cool soft pallet and I tried to sleep on a hot rug in the kitchen, Lady called for a basin of water and a glass of sweet milk, and I was roused to serve it.

  Or was it when Other was napping on a pallet in her room and I was one of the children fanning the flies away from little Miss while she slept, that Lady called from the next room, "Mammy, send Cindy up with some cool water and a glass of sweet milk. I'm thirsty and I want a sponge bath." I walked in with what she wanted. Lady made herself comfortable in her rocking chair. "Are you hungry?" I nodded. She handed me the glass of milk. I hesitated. "You can drink it." I took the glass and drank. She took the glass from my hand and drank right after me. I was surprised. Really I was astounded. I didn't know the word then, but that's what I was.

  "Help me unbutton my dress; I want to wash." I helped her take off her dress. Her bared breast was just a little thing with a dented nipple almost as big as the circle it stood in. The circle was that tiny. "Are you still hungry?" I nodded again.

  She pulled me onto her lap and I suckled at her breast till her warm milk filled me. As always, it was a cheering surprise for both of us. We had been sharing these little spurred-by-envy suppers all my memory, but each time the milk came and how long it came without running out was a mystery to us both. Later, when I slept beside her, she said, "You're my little girl, aren't you?"

  11

  Mammy worked from can't-see in the morning to can't-see at night, in that great whitewashed wide-columned house surrounded by curvy furrowed fields. The mud, the dirt, was so red, when you looked at the cotton blooming in a field it brought to mind a sleeping gown after childbirth—all soft white cotton and blood.

  If it was mine to be able to paint pictures, if I possessed the gift of painting, I would paint a cotton gown balled up and thrown into a corner waiting to be washed, and I would call it "Georgia."

  Mammy never knew rest, but she is no fool. I believe she knows why R. doesn't give a damn about Other anymore. Mammy knows that he's in love with me, and after the Tragedy there's nothing to keep us apart.

  The Tragedy, yes, that is what it was. I cried when that child died. R. thought she was beautiful, and Other thought she was spoilt. Neither one of them was right. Everything that was gold and bold lived big in Precious. She looked too much like my Daddy to be pretty. Except when she kissed me and I would pull her curls. Precious: that's what I called her. Her grandfather would look right through me, but she would run to me and throw her arms around my waist. I got his hugs from her, and they were sweet to me, precious. She gave me my Daddy's kisses. She was his grandchild and they were my kisses, and her mouth looked just like his mouth. Not like Other's or Lady's or R.'s. She had Planter's mouth, and she gave me Planter's kisses.

  The night Precious died, R. tried to plant a child in me. Most every other time, he pulled out, making a mess on my belly that shamed me. He didn't want any bastards, beige or white.

  They thought he stayed alone with her, his dead Precious, in that room those days between her death and the burial. But I was there. I was there. I held his hand in the
burning light, because Precious was afraid of the dark.

  In that room we were a family. Grief will form one family just the way it will destroy another. It's a primary force. What did he lose when he lost her? What do I know 'bout what runs between a daddy and his daughter? Not very much. R. didn't know why Precious cried in the dark, and I don't know either.

  12

  Georgia is dirty laundry what needs washing.

  I told that to R. last evening. We were out walking in Oakland Cemetery. Oakland Cemetery may well be the prettiest garden in Atlanta. And the dead don't care who's out walking with who and if their colors match. Plenty folks, black and white, pack picnics and make a feast of a visit. All those gravestones got us to talking 'bout whether I should or should not run home to Mammy.

  I have my reasons for not going and I have his. His reason is Other. Chivalry dictates that his wife and his mistress do not meet. I said, "Georgia is laundry what needs washing." He put one of his manicured hands over each of my ears and pressed. "Peanut head," he said. I couldn't tell if it was a joke or an insult, he was pressing so hard. I didn't like the fact he wouldn't acknowledge my truth.

  Georgia is dirty laundry what needs washing.

  If I didn't want to back down, I knew I had to turn my taunt into a joke. "I've got a big head. A watermelon head, more likely. Too big for ladies' hats. At least a walnut. You can crack open a peanut, so easy," I said. "You can do it with your fingers."

  "You're too smart for your own good."

  I smiled; he dropped his hands to his side. "I sent you on that Grand Tour as a jest," he said.

  I wasn't smiling anymore. "Charleston's dirty laundry too. All of South Carolina." No sooner than I said it, he slapped me. He had never hit me before. No man had.

  "The only thing you can beat out of me is my love for you." Beauty taught us to say that, and say it quick. It was the first sentence she taught every girl in her house. It stopped a lot of fights; it stopped her from having to shoot a man or two. It was an easy sentence to remember and a hard sentence to forget, especially with a palm print on your face. Anyway, it wasn't me he wanted to slap. But he couldn't slap Other. "I ain't taking her licks," I said.

  I walked away from him. The red imprint of his hand was raised across my cheek. I traced the outline of it with the tip of my finger. Mammy had slapped me too many times to count. I knew well this vanishing brand. Invisible but searing.

  Strange how you bring things to you. I think of the white house and Mammy, and I get slapped. Just what I was afraid of happened before I could even go home. How strange that just when I might go, Other had got there first. Run back to the house because R. left her. I had asked him to tell me what he said, what she said, how it looked, a dozen times. He didn't tell me anything. He only told me it was over.

  But the walls have ears, and her maid told my maid, and my maid told me, that Other had run back from Mealy Mouth's deathbed to find R. already packed. That she had declared her love and pleaded with him. That he had cursed her but called her my darling or dear, but he told her he didn't give a tinker's damn what happened to her. When he walked out, she sat down on the stairs and cried. Then she ran home to my mother. That was just a month ago.

  13

  I will go to see Beauty today. I met R. under her whorehouse roof. Simple as that. I was fourteen years old. It was just before the war. Beauty needed a maid to pick up after her girls, so she bought me in the slave market down on the water in Charleston. I had an answer when any blue-blooded gentleboy at Beauty's would ask, "How a fine piece of embroidery like you get beyond white columns and painted walls?" They didn't expect an answer, but I had one. A fancy sentence I had practiced to show I was somebody: "A strange series of deaths in rapid succession following an influenza epidemic left a trail of inheritances that led me to the flesh market with a stop of work with a family who couldn't afford to keep a second ladies' maid." My twenty-dollar sentence was usually good for a laugh and a nickel tip.

  Truth was, everybody was too busy nursing the sick, mourning, and grieving to write Planter and tell him that his old friend was dead, that the friend's son had died before he could marry, that I was living with a family who needed money, and would he like to buy me back. I didn't know how to write then; I couldn't tell the news that might have saved me.

  Beauty bought me to serve in her place as a girl-of-all-work, but there was so much dirty laundry, all I ever did is wash soiled sheets, bleach sheets, iron sheets. You paid for pussy at Beauty's or you didn't get any, and the planters that came to Beauty didn't need to pay for poontang they could steal back at home, so I was most usually the only female virgin in the house. Males of that persuasion were frequent visitors. Mainly the planters liked their meat what we liked to call pink—before a girl began to bleed. They had less brats around the place that way. I think Beauty thought of buying me because she wanted to feel like more of a lady to R.

  I'm going to stop writing and go right now.

  14

  Walking to Beauty's, my face still stung where R. slapped me. But his words had stung me more. My Grand Tour was rivers: the Thames, the Seine, what do they call all those canals in Venice? What name did that water go by? What destinations were in that book, Murray's Infallible Handbook? Rivers and the lake at Como. Atlanta is a landlocked place, a rail terminus, really and only. If it becomes a great city, it will be one of the first not built on a river. I ain't seen a big body of water in a time, but I still have my memories. Something that I cherish so much cannot have been a joke.

  I went in a party of some friends of R.'s, an unpaid but working companion. The kind that holds the chairs on deck, fetches games, takes the smallest slice of beef, eats in the cabin when there is no space at table, ate at table when I wasn't hungry when someone needed a companion. I saw paintings. In Rome I met a colored woman from the United States who lived there as a sculptor of marble. She carved marble fauns. She and those rivers were a revelation to me.

  Today, I came up the back way and in the kitchen door. Beauty's unpowdered nose was inside a great big cup of coffee. I've seen folk go down to the river to get baptized and I've seen them get sprinkled. None ever seemed so washed as Beauty after her coffee. Each and every morning that old whore jumped fully into that big black cup of coffee, and when she stepped away from her morning meal, she was fully cleansed of the sins of the night.

  She didn't wait for Sunday for communion and she didn't wait for the river to be baptized; she had baptism and communion right there in her kitchen every morning. When any of the girls woke themselves up to share breakfast with Beauty, they got communion too. Morning with Beauty was its own religion.

  Beauty isn't young. Her face was painted white, and the hair on the top of her head was the same shade of burgundy as the velvet of her front room chairs. Shaped like an hourglass but built like a brick house, she counted the change right the first time. She had a son didn't live with her. She sent him away to school. I don't believe in that. Over the years I've tried to talk Beauty into bringing the boy back with her to live. But she wouldn't hear me. Anyhow, he's a man now.

  I sat myself down in the chair beside her. There was an empty cup in front of me like she was expecting somebody. She poured coffee into it. I asked her what I should do 'bout going home. Beauty just grunted, but she was serving me, and that said something. I pulled in closer to the table. The cup tingled in my hands. Beauty took another sip of coffee. "One way of seeing it, when you got a bitch for a mother she should expect to die alone. Other is, blood is blood." It was my turn to grunt. I looked into her eyes and knew that she expected to die alone. And I knew that for all her hospitality to me, her absence from He, him, her son, maybe had earned that. This whore had no "heart of gold," but then again she didn't pretend to. She was no better than she should be, but she was as good as need be. And my need be great.

  The hand that had itched to slap her was brushed by her hand serving me. I tried to remember Mama pouring me a cup of coffee. Nothing came. She
asked me if I was afraid of going. I said yes. She shook her head. I'd never seen her pity me. Not when she bought me off the auction block, not when she had me serving for her. She said, "Sometimes the only way to stop being afraid of a thing is to let it happen."

  Blood is blood. I tried to imagine Other's hand pouring coffee for me. I winced and hoped R.'s bastard was growing in my belly. Beauty reached out and lifted up my face with the knuckles of her bent fingers. "If he had the reason, he might marry you."

  "I don't want to give him a reason," I lied.

  Lying brings a nervous tickle to my throat. My throat started tickling, and I laughed. Dark brown liquid shot from my mouth onto Beauty. I gasped and coughed again. She pushed me away from the table and all her fine linens. "You gone straight crazy, took the Black Diamond Express. Makes no stops and arrives in hell early." I was trying to stop laughing. I was trying to remember Mammy serving me something, pouring one cup of coffee, but all I could remember was Mammy pouring coffee for Other, her fine white hands trembling as Mammy filled her cup. And Lady holding out the cool glass of fresh milk to me. I don't know what face I made. But Beauty got to looking kinda scared. "Whatever you're thinking about don't think about."

  "Then let me pour the next cup of coffee," I said.

  15

  R. makes "his rounds," as he names them, calling on the mayor, his bankers, hearing the chatter of the town, holding a cracked-kid-gloved finger up to the battering winds of cash, color, and politics each morning, returning to me at noon for his dinner. That's every day.

  I have no appetite for presiding in my dining room. Most days I give everybody a holiday. His servants, my friends. There are no silent brown ghosts in this house—there's an eye for every hand and more ears than fingers 'round most houses. How the white people live surrounded by spies, I don't know. I can't do it. The slime of hatred on every sliver of soap, every sheet smoothed across every bed. "Our house has the supreme elegance of privacy," he says, referring to the small number of servants.