The Wind Done Gone Page 6

I told him I was tired, and he told me to be down in time for the evening meal. I told him dust was with me still. Dust of death and dust of road. I needed sleep, day sleep now, and water. I blinked, and then I wanted to cry with no cause.

  He said, "Be down in time for supper. A Congressman is coming to dine."

  At noon the young maid brought dinner up to my room: cold fried chicken and a glass of wine. She is an olive-skinned, straight-haired girl, a slim-as-a-beanpole beauty, heavy on her feet, but there is a lot of Indian in her nigger. She closed the door behind her when she entered. Just then she appeared a breathless, hipless, and unsexed creature. The drumming of her feet as she crossed my room, placing the tray or unpacking my bag or storing clothes away in the chifforobe, lulled me to sleep. I fell asleep and dreamed of Jeems.

  It was a very bad dream. I dug up the grave of the last of the dead baby boys. The one born the year I went away. I dug into his grave, opened the coffin, and Jeems popped out, live, like a jack-in-the-box. He had a hundred white teeth. There were too many teeth, but they were so pretty, like pearls bright shining, and I was glad he had so many yet repulsed at the same time. I wanted him to stop grinning so he would still have the teeth but I wouldn't see them.

  But he wouldn't stop grinning, and I couldn't get the lid of the coffin back on. I woke up with sweat and tears running down my face. I just had time to dress.

  34

  I'll be late down to supper now. But R. say the Congressman will be later. I hope Mrs. Dred larded the turkey enough so the meat won't be dry with long cooking. Of all our peculiar customs, I find it strange that we denizens of the Southland don't have a taste for cool food—even in August. I told her to wrap the turkey in bacon before cooking, but she knows I don't like to serve the turkey with the bacon on it, so I suspect the bacon is someone's dinner and not on the turkey at all, and I can't be angry. Everybody needs to eat.

  R. came into the room and led me to the bed. He lay me down upon it. And undressed me as if I was a child. He sat down beside me. He kissed my forehead and my lips. Ran his hand across my belly. His hand just hovered over the curly dark separating my thighs. When he looked at me this way, I knew he wouldn't love me. Wouldn't touch me. Wouldn't take me.

  I still stir his mind, but I can no longer for sure stir his body. He is still beautiful. Men seem to start glowing with years. I wonder if they shine with the invisible candles that light up good leather when it ages. He wears his wealth on his face. Life has carved a leanness into the bones of my man that the years of plenty and the years of excess, drink and food, do not blight—completely.

  Light in August. I used to be scared I would have a baby. Now I am scared I will not. My waist is narrow as a virgin's, and my stomach is babyless flat, my breast babyless high. I like to think I wear my years lightly. Virgins go dry and age quickly into brittle spinsters. Women who are touched by many different men become shopworn angels. You can see the smudges of bourbon breath mottling their eyes. Mothers grow flaccid, rich in baby love, each baby taking some of the mother's beauty as if the baby knows it needs to protect its babyself by making Mama less kiss-daddy pretty. Each baby knows the baby to come takes something away from the baby in arms, so little Jenny and little Carrie cry in the night just when Daddy's rising. They gray Mama's hair and suck the fullness out of her breast. Filling her heart with such love, she don't need to look in the mirror to see who she is. I learned all that at Beauty's. What the babies take away, the girls paint back on.

  Me, I'm looking in the mirror, still. The mirror on the wall and the mirror in his eyes. I see Beauty grow blowsy; I see Other grow wider with the laying of three men and the birthing of three babies. Me—I've only had one man and no babies, and so my skin is not etched like marble with the pale wiggling seams where life stretched forth to cover life—but I am greedy for weight, the weight of life growing within me, the relief the old cow knows when she delivers in July and is light in August.

  "Do you ever think about marrying me?" he asks.

  "No."

  "I'm thinking about marrying you."

  I sit up on the bed. I don't look at him. It's time to get my dress on. I smell dinner ready in the kitchen. I wonder if Cook did lard the turkey. R. kisses me again on the forehead. For the first time in a long time, I wonder how much I remind him of Other and how much in his eyes I resemble their child. He outlines the curve of my eyebrow, and I know he is thinking of them.

  I had to get this down. But now I have to dress. I will put on the red gown and the large gold hoops in my ears. I had intended to choose a more subdued dress, but I feel, after R.'s declaration, it will be amusing to play with his notion of who I am and watch him squirm. He's playing with me. I will not play in the shadow of Other.

  35

  The Congressman was colored. And I could not have been more charmed. I wish I could have changed gowns. Unfortunately, all he did was find fault with me, too many faults for a different dress to have helped.

  There were three of us at table. Instead of placing our guest between us, R. sat me in the middle as a kind of no man's land. Each man sat at a head of the table.

  I wished from the moment I walked in that I hadn't worn my hoops. Under the Congressman's gaze the hoops felt niggerish and the deepness of the cut of the bosom of my gown seemed sluttish.

  But R. seemed pleased. He expected the Congressman to admire me, so all he saw was admiration.

  The dinner began slowly. There was some kind of soup, a hot soup served in handled cold creamed soup bowls that made me cringe, and the turkey was dry. We had chess pie for dessert, a recipe that come over from Tennessee, like pecan pie without the pecans. It was an after-the-war food, elegant in its unadorned poverty. The Congressman smiled at his first crispy-sweet bite.

  R. caught this, and laughed. "You don't believe me. Cindy is not your ordinary lady—she's been on the Grand Tour."

  "My goodness." For the first time the Congressman was impressed.

  "You and Mrs. Hemmings?"

  "Mrs. Hemmings?"

  "Mrs. Hemmings who Jefferson took to Paris."

  R. and the Congressman begin to share a laugh at my expense. To veer back to politeness the Congressman directed another question to me.

  "What ship did you cross over on?"

  "The Baltic."

  "How funny, how very funny."

  Now the Congressman was laughing anew, and I was laughing too. We knew about the Baltic. Only R. was still laughing at the old, cold joke, embedded like an insect in amber, that the slave Hemmings' stay in Paris had been a Grand Tour. And while we free Negroes were laughing at the strangeness of transformations, I was wondering what Lady would think of my table.

  Later, when I poured them coffee and they were enjoying their cigars, before their business began in earnest and I would retire, the Congressman asked R. if he was following the career of "my friend Francis L. Cardozo. You might be useful collaborators."

  "The state treasurer?" responded R.

  "Exactly."

  "I know the name."

  "He was educated in Glasgow and in London. He was a minister in New Haven. Since the war he's been the principal of a school for blacks in Charleston. Next time you're in Charleston, you should see him."

  R. shrugged. His cigar had gone out. He lit it again.

  "It would be interesting to meet with him in Washington. Or bring him to see us in Atlanta."

  R. changed the subject. If he was interested in the South's new colored leaders, he wasn't interested in them in his beloved old seaside town. He might eat with them in Atlanta or Washington, but he would never eat with them in Charleston.

  I wonder what this means for me?

  And I wondered if the Congressman had raised Cardozo's name at just that time, the moment I was pouring, to raise just that question in my mind.

  36

  I crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a ship called the Baltic. The crossing took seventeen days. My hate of seawater did not emerge until I was upon it for at least thre
e or four. It popped up the way one of the sailors said that icebergs do. Out of the fish-rich darkness emerges this white, killing thing. Pointing straight up to the sky. A ship is like a cotton farm. Everyone has his place. There are the officers and the sailors. From the officers' uniforms dangle brass buttons that sparkle like stars against the blue, the way soldiers' buttons do.

  When I first saw R. in his soldier's uniform, I wondered who he had got it off, what dead boy or man. Whose skin did he inherit? Or is my skin the only skin that has been inherited in this—dare I say it—family?

  It was during the burning of Atlanta; it was late in the war.

  Or did he just buy that uniform in a store? I know you don't buy them in a store. Did he have it made up, in preparation? When did he know, when did he become a soldier in the South? A Confederate officer willing to die, to keep me—different from the sailors on the ship. The sailors who live in the hole and have more work and less water and no brass buttons, the difference between them and me—words on paper. I had the softer labor.

  Words on paper, a bill of sale written out at the slave market in Charleston, a name and a price. The girls who sell themselves at Beauty's are saved the pain of words on paper; their prices disappear, spoken and forgotten in the air. The most free slaves are the ones who cannot read or write.

  Later, I read about the Baltic. It carried supplies for the relief of Fort Sumter. I guess the Congressman had read about it too. Read and remembered.

  37

  Atlanta looks small this morning when I went go out walking. Everything's so new. I smell the creosote in the train smoke and I remember wanting to go places, but I don't want anything now. Except to sit on the platform of the Atlanta train station and watch the folks coming and going, kissing and leaving.

  Mama's dead, and I'm feeling old. I'm up next. It's my turn to die. R. wants to move to Charleston. He wants to begin again. His daughter is dead. Every day all day so many events—but these two deaths are the center around which the rest of both our lives revolve. One was inevitable, the other a miracle. If Precious had lived, R. would never have thought of marrying me.

  When his father was living, he felt the spit of paternal hypocrisy falling down on his city, on Charleston, like rain. He grew leery of the hypocrisy of the old place, the citizens who loved the oldness of their town but denounced with silence the vigorous sinners who had built it. They were an old family, and R. was descended from the best of the original line of bold sinners. He had not changed but he kept hoping the town would, that it would reach back beyond its proper present and allow him place. Somehow, with his father's death, R. seemed to think all his critics had vanished. All his longing glances were backward. Well, let him go to Charleston and see what he finds.

  38

  No sooner was R. out my door than I sent a message 'round to Jeems, asking him to come by the house to take some cakes back to Garlic. Then I ransacked my cookbooks for Excellency cake or Bonaparte cake or Presidential cake—something that would taste just like who I now knew Garlic to be, Garlic's position. Finding nothing equal to my new understanding of the man, I adapted a cake, exchanging bourbon and adding walnuts—a little bow to his hard outside and strength. I covered my confection with a golden brown maple-flavored icing and called it Empire cake. Cook was taking more golden layers out of the oven when the messenger returned, note in hand, having looked all over for Jeems. Figuring Jeems must a set off for home, he gave up.

  I beat butter for the icing all afternoon long, it seemed. One of my tears slipped into the butter and I beat it in. The salt of the tear was a perfect foil to the sweetness of the butter. I smiled to think of how I had achieved perfection of the flavor.

  When had R. grown old? When did he stop being Other's husband? How will I know? How will I let myself know? When did I start loving R.? Had it stopped? Could it stop? Had I ever really loved him, or had I just wanted what was hers? Was he mine before he was hers? Was it me he saw when he first saw her walking down the steps of Twelve Slaves Strong as Trees? We had been lovers for over a year then. When did I first hear that he had met her? I remember all the pages I had covered with my name changed to end with his. All the fake letters I signed Mrs. R—B—, never thinking one day my name might change. Now, with a tear of a blue velvet riding habit, muddied, bloodied, never to be cleaned, all is possible. Was no more wanted than this extraordinary cake drawing ants?

  39

  I wonder if Jeems can read. I've decided to write him a letter. It's going to say:

  Dear Jeems,

  Thank you for riding me to town. It's nice to remember old friends.

  I was wondering how to close the letter when Jeems knocked right on the front door. I must have looked surprised. "This here's yo' front do', ain't it? This ain't Cap'n B house, is it?"

  "It's my house."

  I had never before had colored company of my own in the front room; now Jeems sat on my sofa visiting me. For a moment I stopped to wonder what Jeems would think, seeing me surrounded by such wealth. Then I remembered myself. We had exchanged our earliest confidences in silk-wallpapered halls and richly furnished corners. We had both dusted and mopped and washed too many fine things, too much Limoge, too much Wedgwood, too many times, to retain awe. The former field slaves will have different relations to wealth (the wealth they see and the wealth they attain) than we, who, like Jeems and me, worked in the house. Familiarity, even with things, breeds contempt.

  "Our Congressman from Alabama came for dinner the other night."

  "Sure like to meet him. Wonder if he knows Smalls."

  "Smalls?"

  "The colored Congressman who seized Planter in '62. Sailed the ship right over to the Union Army."

  "How do you know that?"

  "I was in the Confederate Army. I was all tore up when it happened." For a fleeting moment Jeems let his face-o-woe mask distort his features. But it just didn't fit anymore. It popped off; he was laughing. "Cried crocodile tears."

  "I'm sure you did. And now?"

  "And now I'm on my way to Tennessee."

  "Tennessee?"

  "I'm no farmer."

  "They have something more than farms in Tennessee?"

  "Horses."

  "Ain't that Virginia, or Kentucky?"

  "Tennessee. I've got some family living on a plantation just outside of Nashville. Belle Meade. They breed fine horses there. They could use a man like me."

  Pieces of our world were just spinning off. Ever since Emancipation. Big and little pieces. Before we never went anywhere.

  "Back when you were a young gal, you remember me from then?"

  "I was never young."

  "Little, then."

  "Of course."

  "When I was little, I got whipped for you."

  "I don't remember that."

  "You didn't get whipped."

  "How I get you in trouble?"

  "Trouble was there; you didn't get me in it. I let you ride my horse. You were ten or eleven. I was thirteen or fourteen. Planter came down and saw you legs spread around that animal, saw it was my horse you was on, and whipped up some pain on me."

  "I remember riding. You never looked at me after that."

  "I'd like to take you riding again."

  "I'd like that too."

  "Would he mind it? Would it matter if he did?"

  "No and yes."

  "No and yes?"

  "He would mind ... if he bothered to notice."

  "But if a white man..."

  "Or some white man might mind for him. Someone who thinks Cap'n still owns you."

  And it be worse than a beating Jeems would catch. They're hanging black men all through the trees. Strange fruit grow in the Southern night. It's the boil on the body of Reconstruction, whites killing blacks. They didn't kill us as often, leastways not directly, when they owned us. All I will remember about Jeems is he caught a beating. There have been so many more pictures of Jeems in my head. Off to the side of those tall, red, laughing boys (who did
the Grand Tour not of Europe but of the Southern universities), a lithe, taller man, observant, graceful Jeems. So many pictures, if in most, he, like me, was way off to the side in my mind's memory. But all those memory pictures started vanishing with a blow to my head, a blow of knowledge. He'd caught a beating for me, and I had never even known.

  He asked me how I was keeping. He told me he was sad for me about my Mama. His pity was too much. I told him not to be. I wanted to be asking him not to leave if he pitied me so much, but my old habit of not asking for what I won't get is strong. I was angry he was leaving, and jealous that he could imagine escaping the world we knew. I shook my head and told him the truth—because I thought it would hurt him. I told him I hadn't known my mother well and she didn't know me.

  I had intended to silence him, but instead my candor loosened his mouth. He too had a tale to tell about mothers, much to my surprise.

  "I never knew, I don't know who my Mama is. They bought me when I was a baby. Some idea Miz had to raise me with the Twins, so I could be their slave but not have 'niggerish' ways. Almost everything best about me is niggerish ways. But that's my defiance, and my defiance is pure Miz. I'm pure African and I got a mulatto mind. That's me. Listen here, gal. Think on this. I 'member Miz always said to the boys she didn't want them marryin' Lady's daughters, not any of 'em. She said, 'You can't divide Lady from Mammy.' Nobody knew what she mean, but I say, if it's true you can't divide Mammy from Lady, maybe you can't divide Lady from Mammy."

  Now what that supposed to mean? I wanted to ride back with Jeems to Cotton Farm, to the answers those acres might provide, to a little more time with him. But he's only stopping back home before going on to Tennessee, straightaway. He's not stopping back through Atlanta, and I'm not returning home. I sent Garlic his cake in the mail.