The Wind Done Gone (11 page)

In that moment, the very moment Douglass leaned toward him to claim some word of his as their secret, I wondered if the Congressman could be mine. And I laugh at myself for wondering. I have been R.'s, but no one had ever been mine. I have never possessed a man. I had never hoped to possess a man. Never even wished to possess a man's soul, for it seemed too close to slaving. But now I am wondering if he could be mine, and if I knew if he could be mine, I might attempt possession. And wondering if I could possess the Congressman (as I turned away from him, all the time stealing sideways glances back at him, while moving back toward Douglass's son) raises the possibility of me possessing R.

Everything about ownership is changing: land, people, money, gold into foreign currency, foreign currency back into foreign gold, and gold back into money in our banks. It doesn't seem in this time of hurricanes and storms and other acts of God, with winds of every sort of change in the air, that hearts would be any different. Why couldn't she who couldn't own, who now owned forty acres and a mule—if I could own a former plantation—could I not own a planter's heart?

R. needs to get home soon. I've sent him a note. "I need what a man who's gone can't do. I love you. Speed your return." I wrote those words in my head while I was looking at Douglass, looking at the Congressman, and some young fool was mumbling to me. Could he, either he, which he, if both could be mine, who would I have? Could I have either?

But the gap-toothed girl, now in a cloak, caught the Congressman's eye, and he moved away, leaving the party with only a distant bow in my direction. And I was left to lesser pleasures of observation.

The dresses were modest and trim; there was an abundance of simple good food. Plates were eaten off laps on stairs after folk were seated on every available chair. Many of the young gentlemen stood.

Douglass has traveled to England and has many English friends. One English gentleman referred to the streamers down the back of a rather saucy bonnet as "follow-me-my-lads," and the back porch burst into laughter as the brown girl in question gaily skipped across the lawn. These are new and lighter days.

Several of the visitors were students at Howard University. Some, as I have already written, were visiting from down South.

I am trying to suck it all in deeply. Trying to feel how this place feels different from the farm when all the white folks were away. That's when we had our holiday, not Christmas. There were times when all of them went to Atlanta or Savannah or Charleston, when the overseer was suddenly taken sick up in bed. Strange how overseers so often took sick when the family was away during the holidays. That is when we had our Christmas.

And now it should be Christmas every day, but it is not. What it is, is the days before. Working, getting ready. Everything now is expectation, hope, waiting for Christmas to come but we don't know when.

This morning I went out walking in my new neighborhood, Georgetown, and I came upon Tudor Place. It's just a house. Just another rich man's house, but I wanted to weep. Weep for beauty, weep for home, weep for not believing Garlic when he told about all the places he had been and what he had seen. Here was the model for our round porch with columns. Here a different variation of the theme of five portions. Garlic's building, Tata, is much more beautiful. It's not just what will they let us be; it's what will we let ourselves be.

I wish I was a man and I could vote. I'd be a man if I could vote now. So much of who we will let ourselves be will be decided by who we will vote for and will we vote and how long will they let us vote.

There's a cartoon I cut out of
Harper's Weekly.
I'm looking at it now. It's a drawing of Jefferson Davis, him that was the President of the Confederacy, Davis, with a big cloak wrapped all around him. His face is long and thin, his eyes so dark, when you glance at the drawing it looks like a skull with a hat and hair, like a skeleton wearing a cloak. And this Jefferson—I like to call him by his first name—he looks like a figure on stage, like a demon sneaking off to do wrong, except he's in the center of the picture, but off to the side
is
the center of
this
picture, and Jeff, he was standing there, looking back into the Senate chamber at a Negro man taking his seat, his Senate seat. A deep dark Negro man surrounded by compatriots is what it looked like. And the Negro man is reading. His hands are on one book, and another book has slid off his table to the floor at his feet. He's propped up and on books. His colleagues are turned to question him, and he's ready.

That's what it looked like to me. There's a caption:
TIME WORKS WONDERS
. I do not know if it was meant to be for or against this dark legislator. Certainly it was the truth. Under that title was written the words of Iago, and between Iago's name and his speech was inserted, in parentheses, the name "Jeff Davis." I read
Othello
again after I saw this cartoon. The speech says, "For that I do suspect the lusty Moor hath leapt into my seat: the thought whereof both like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards." If I had been Othello's friend, Desdemona would still be alive, and they'd have plenty of pretty babies.

Othello's just a creation. Maybe just like me. But Robert B. Elliott be real. He be born in Massachusetts. He studied at Eton College in England and now he's in the Congress. Robert B. Elliot be real and my Congressman knows him. James Rapier studied in Canada and now he's in Congress. He's another "historical figure." And my Jeems, his beloved Smalls, I've found all about him now, for Jeems's sweet sake. Smalls was wholly self-educated and wholly factual. He taught himself to read and write. How you do that? John Roy Lynch, he worked in a photographer's studio and he looked across an alley into a white schoolroom and followed his lessons from a distance right into the Mississippi house and on into the Congress of these United States. He merits a line in anybody's history of these United States. But it's one thing to read about them and quite another to smell a man's scent, hear his quicker mind responding to your own quick thought. Tick-tock. It's an altogether different thing.

There are facts can poison you dead as arsenic. I have long known this to be true. There are facts can get you drunker than sipping whiskey straight. This is a sweet and new discovery.
O brave new world!
Sweet Jesus! Let me know some more about it! Please God!

R.'s returned. He looks a thousand years old. His hair is turning white, and he has let it grow long. This is a Southern city, but he doesn't fit in here. He strides about in black silk and velvet and looks like the ghost of the Confederacy, a sauntering relic haunting the place. Like the evil Godmother at the baby's christening. Why do I write that? I feel like the princess who is cursed at birth. And they try to change the curse, try to move her to safety. Why does R. look like the evil Godmother? Who looks like the prince? Who does R. look like?

His face looks so different in this light. I call out to myself, "Who is this man I lay with?" and I have no response. This man is unknown to me. Perhaps even unknowable by me. And maybe that is exactly what I love about my man. Not knowing him feels so familiar, as familiar as the smell of whiskey, and leather, and horses, and a certain cologne, yes. He is the stuff of Lady's dreams, my dark-eyed gambler and arrogant risk-taker. The arrogance was essential...

If he has anything to say to me, he should just say it.

One of our Senators, a gentleman from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, sent a bushel basket of Chesapeake Bay oysters 'round to the townhouse in honor of R.'s return last evening. People heard that he had a wife and that she died. Neither of us was hungry for supper, so we ate the oysters for breakfast.

He said I looked like a mermaid. I said he looked like King Neptune. He did look just like some briny sea god, with a mud-caked shell in his fingers, sucking down the juice after the plump-jiggle slid down his throat. I had to smile at him, and smile at the memory of wanting him to slide down my throat. My desire for him had been so much more than distraction or work. Once upon a time I was as hungry for him as today we are hungry for breakfast.

Love and desire are not the same thing. Most often they don't even live in the same house. They should but they don't. He promised me a trip back across the water, to Europe, a grander tour, ensemble, together. He didn't see me shudder.

For his teeth were finding a pearl just at that moment. He plucked it from his mouth with his fingers. The pearl was blue when you looked at it one way and gray when you looked at it in another. It was very small and not so exactly round. He balanced it on the tip of his pointer finger, and I snatched it with my tongue and swallowed.

I want to surprise him. At least once again. I want to insist without words that we will not just be restless, and prosperous, and contained. I want to have more than a liquor bottle to keep me in my skin, to keep me in my house. Once he could rock me into my skin, rock me out of my imagination into the marrow of my bones. He did that for me and I remember it. Will every kiss I kiss be in remembrance of him, who he used to be?

I swallowed the pearl, and tears appeared in his eyes, tears I had never seen before. He knows our passion plays hide-and-seek with us now. Rain falls in our hearts. Rain, rain, go away! Cindy and R.B. want to play! Oysters are no breakfast food.

As if in sympathy, it began to rain outside. After breakfast I went to my room to write a letter to Beauty, a letter full of gloom. "It's raining now. Heaven's tears are washing over us. In the Capital City this is the sacrament that substitutes for breakfast with Beauty..." I had just written those words when R. walked into my room without knocking.

He kissed me on the back of the neck and dropped a pack of letters onto my little desk. I asked him what it was. A smile curled onto his lips, sharp and tight, as dangerous a curve as the curve of my breasts. Sneering, he was an especially good-looking man; nastiness brought a flash of "earlier days" across his face. I had to tell myself to breathe, because he took my breath away. He flicked that packet onto my desk in a manner these city Negroes might call "hincty," something akin to but different from "uppity," with a studied nonchalance that barely covers insolence and smells of fear.

For the first time, in all the time I had known him, he was trying too hard. The gesture was, as the Creoles (who, though few and far between in number, lend their great charm to this city, when they can be found) say, "
un peu trop,
" just a little too much. Or were all his gestures that way and I just was seeing it for the first time? Certainly this gesture was
de trop
and his words were the cherries on the cake. "Your manumission papers," he said, without hurting me at all.

He walked out of the room without saying another word.

They were love letters. The letters Lady had written to Cousin and the letters he had written to her. I had heard from Miss Priss that Lady, in her delirium on her deathbed, had called out someone's name. It was hard to hear what she was saying, but Miss Priss thought she was calling Feleepe, the name of her cousin who had been killed in the duel. The cousin who died in New Orleans just before Lady married. Lady herself had told me some little about him. Once, even, holding me in her arms, she had laughed and cried, laughed and cried, rocking me back and forth, kissing my head, whispering, "I wish you were my child, I wish you were my child." I thought very little about it. I had so long and feverently wished for Lady to be my mother, her wish sounded to my ear only natural and true. It's hard, having natural wishes in an unnatural time.

There is no difficulty in deciphering these letters. Each of them wrote a beautiful hand. Each was urgently trying to convey information of supreme importance, and they felt safe, so their sentences ran frankly naked. Lady and Cousin were beautiful children, bold and unhurt. For a time, in the early pages, that untested boldness served them as bravery and lent clarity to every utterance. Later, when I knew her, Lady's every utterance was dressed, and all meaning obscured and distorted, the way her body was obscured and distorted by whalebones and hoops and cinches and pantalets and all manner of torturous frippery. But at the first all was plain and simple.

P———,

I add no dear or darling, your name alone is prayer! I tremble in fear of God's judgment, for I know I am guilty of idolatrous worship—of you. How can I love God with all my heart when I have no heart? You have my heart. I beg you to go to church on Sunday, for it is the only way my heart can go and I may see you there. Ask Daddy soon. I am not too young. And Mother loves you so. I hear her call, her greeting, "Sweet son of own departed sister." How she does go on, Mamma. This house is neither cool enough nor hot enough. Take me away from it to some place where the air is not the temperature of my skin—where mosquito bites are not the only thing I feel. E

***

Dearest Girl, Darling E———,

Dearest and darling are your name. Belonging to you alone. There are other Elizabeths, other Emilys, other E———s, but there is only one dearest girl, you. I shall give you fire and ice when we are married. I'll rub ice on your wrists in July and build great big fires in December. Don't you swoon. P.

***

P.

Mother found your last letter and took to weeping. "What does he mean, what does he mean?" When I tried to explain, she interrupted me, saying, "Oh, it's all too clear, all too clear." I have no idea what she's so upset about. You should ask Daddy at once. I think they don't believe you really want to marry me. Your E.

***

My dear E——,

Your father refuses to let me marry you. I asked him to state his reservation, and he could say only that your mother disapproves of the match. I must talk to my Aunt. P.

***

P.

Mother does nothing but cry. She took me on her lap and whispered, between sobs, "If it was possible, I would allow it." If I do more than bow in your direction at church, she will remove me from the city. She says the curse of Haiti is upon us.