The Wind Done Gone (16 page)

The year I turned twelve the Twins, Other's big-boned, red-haired Twins, came up to the house for a big dinner before leaving on a winter's hunt. Jeems was with them. No one went to bed till late. The night was cold and quiet. The stars so still and lovely, until they began to cry out and awaken me. I slept beside Other on the floor of her room. I got up, pushed open the window, and stared out like a wolf cub. That is exactly how I felt. Young, dangerous, like I could loot a henhouse on my paws with my teeth. Frisky, like the moon was lifted into the sky to listen to me howl. Like I could bite anyone and eat anything and leave my piles wherever I pleased. That night I felt that way. Everybody should have one night like that sometime in their life. But you pay the high price. If you have one, you'll want another, and maybe never get it. Yearning is a heavy purse. But not to know is a lighter, more starving, burden. Me, I carry the weight of knowing, cuddling close the hope I will know again what I have known before. I stood out there. Opened my mouth and howled. I made no real sound. Only a high-pitched sob no one heard, a squeaking whine that came from the soup of sky and earth and time spinning inside me. I looked out into the darkness and saw Jeems looking across his own darkness hearing me. His teeth and eye whites shined so bright into my darkness, I got scared. I stuck my thumb in my mouth and began to suck. I ran back to my piece of the floor, curled into a little ball, and rocked myself to sleep. It was Christmas Eve.

Christmas Day came and went. Plum pudding, goose, just us. No one from the neighborhood. No one Debt is willing to know is willing to know me. I believe that the count in the community is he has gone to crazy. When Debt got up from the table to go into Lady's old office, a room I am changing into a library of sorts, I asked Miss Priss and her parents to join me. Garlic carved from the joint and we all ate well.

Today is New Year's Day. I am too tired to write most of the time. Downstairs they're cooking black-eye peas. It supposed to bring good luck. I'm not eating any black-eye peas. Nothing no black people are doing in any large number is bringing good luck to anybody. We ain't got no good luck. I won't eat any black-eye peas. Maybe I'll eat the greens, though. Garlic eats greens every first of the year, and in a way he is a rich man. Maybe the greens work, less folks do it. Maybe it works; some of us are getting over.

This place, every inch of it, feels like a tomb. I can't wait to get back to Atlanta.

We are leaving today. And I think back on the first time I left this place for good. Planter say, "You the devil yourself, child."

"How you know that?" I ask.

"Every time I look at you I feel the devil inside me. Your Devil calling to my devil to get out."

"How you get him back in when he come out?" I ask.

"I drown him in whisky," my Daddy says.

"How'm I gonna get my Devil back in?" I ask Daddy.

"I don't know, child, I don't know. What I do know is there's nothing for you on this place, child, nothing but vinegar. I'm not waiting for the day my daughter's husband takes her sister to his bed. It's done everywhere over this county, but it won't do here. Side by side to my Miss, she will suffer in the comparison, and you will suffer if I leave you here to watch her marry." He said all that. It was all mixed up and halting. But he got it out after a time.

I got mine out quickly, at last. "You could set me free."

"It is better be a slave to a rich man than a slave to poverty. Poverty is a cruel master, a cruel master every day. And there are kind masters in the world."

"I don't want to go."

"You distract your mother more than you know. And I have lost too many children for her to lose none."

"What has that to do with me?"

"I'm willing to lose another to make her feel the loss of one. My sorrow needs company."

So he sold me to his friends in Charleston with the promise they would be kind, and they were kind enough. But the influenza came through, and so many died in so few days, so many wills, and I was passed along with the Thomas Elfe chairs from house to house, until, like the chairs, I stumbled into an establishment more starved of cash than elegance, and I was sold. Too many folk died, and I was in the market and my breasts were turning red from the sun. Later, the skin from my chest would come off in sheets. This is my story and I tell it again.

***

I get in Debt's carriage. It was an altogether different girl that got into Planter's then. Back then, before the country was at war, when the belles were still dancing, and the swains still provoked swooning, when the blue blood of the South was huntin', shootin', fishin', drinkin', arguin', and even studyin' a little, at Virginia, at Princeton, at Harvard, and at William and Mary, before the first public brother-against-brother blood had been publicly shed, I went to war, and I was a battlefield.

My weapon against fear was anger. My shield against pain was my own screamless, bloodless, battlefield surgery performed without ether or alcohol. I cut off memories, I gouged out feelings the way you gouge out the little dirty places on a potato you dig up in the field before you serve it at the table. I gouged out dirt holes where I found them in my soul, and in my mind, and in my heart. I amputated and cauterized with searing thoughts, thoughts so disgusting I not only never thought them again, I recollect distinctly I have never thought again in the particular place that spawned the particular thought. And with the bleeding parts cut away, the necessary places cauterized, I survived, as fortunate soldiers do.

I fought my war before the war. And in it I earned my courage. And when I stopped being afraid, there were not many places left to hurt, and I thought so fast and clear—so separate I was from feeling. Feeling slows down most women's minds. Mine is not hindered like that. It is not burdened.

I think quick. So I recall it's not slavery and freedom that separate my now from my then; it's when I could read and when I could not, it's when Mammy loved me and I didn't know it, and when Mammy loved me and I did. It is when Lady was white and when Lady was black. It is still me, and it's still a carriage, but me in the carriage has changed more than I would have thought possible. All my old dreams have come true, and I am too tired to dream anew.

Other's man, house, and farm are mine; this is not a complete surprise. These things were hoped for and achieved. To look in the mirror and know, not simply that my beauty eclipsed hers, but that it is elemental, that it does not require purchase or contrast to be, or to be valued, is a miracle. A miracle begun when? When I saw myself reflected in the Congressman's eyes as I twirled in his arms. I want to see myself, again, in that mirror.

We are back in Atlanta. It seems so short and flat after the Capital. A place to move through, not a place to stay. A place that was not, a place that will be, but a place of friends. This is the only city in the world in which I have friends. Am I am ready to rest and be thankful?

I tiptoe into Beauty at breakfast this morning. Just looking at her makes me smile. She powders her face so white and dyes her hair so red, I expect to hear God shout down, "So you think you paint better than me!"

"Mrs!" Beauty says out loud to me. I hold out my hand and wiggle my finger; the ring sparkles. She presses a cup of coffee into my hand and I too sip. "I wasn't jealous of you having him in your bed. I had that before you did, but I don't believe anybody's ever married me. I think I'd remember if they had." We both laughed.

"I know you've been asked," I say.

"Asked, yes, I've been asked but not by him, and he's the only one I'd give up my ladies for. For him and a proper ring, I might just have given up pussy."

"You are too horrible," I say. If I could be scandalized, I would be.

She hugs me. It's a way of saying congratulations, well done. She kisses me on the forehead and I kiss her on the lips. I am so tired of being alone, and Debt has not been true company for me in a long time, since before Precious died. We are just old times now. I kiss Beauty because Jeems is a glorified stable boy and the Congressman is far away and because we both love R. One way of looking at it, all women are niggers. For sure, every woman I ever knew was a nigger—whether she knew it or not.

We dip toast into our coffee, and it is sacrament, benediction, and prayer.

I go home and pray for more.

The Congressman sent his card 'round to me. I waited for him all the afternoon, and he did not come until evening, when R. received him and I sat in the drawing room keeping busy, not with my sewing but re-reading this diary. The men caught me at it. The Congressman feigned snatching it away. Mr. Chauffeur assured him that the sanctity of the little book would never be violated under his roof. The Congressman commended R.'s virtue, and I contradicted him. He possessed not virtue in surfeit, but curiosity in deficit.

Beauty and I were out in the shops together this afternoon. We passed the Congressman, and he lifted his hat and bowed in my direction. There was a sober look on his face and a smile of complete contentment that provoked restlessness in me. I want to taste what he tastes.

I am feeling a touch poorly. My joints are aching almost all the time now, and I must be clever with my hair; I've lost quite a bit of it. There is a doctor in Washington I particularly like. I've asked R. to make arrangements for me to see him. There's worry in R.'s eyes. His worry makes me worry more.

R. has asked the Congressman to accompany me back up to Washington, as he is going in that direction and R. is tied by business to this city. The Congressman has further suggested that I stay at the home of his sister, a Mrs. Harris who lives in Le Detroit Park near Howard University. I am alarmed to be so happy. Later, R. told me that he was touched by the Congressman's kindness and would seek to do business with the man even when he wasn't in office. "Some of them are rather fine sorts of men," R. says. "Not the finest, but fine."

The train has the same effect as a draught of laudanum. It excites and numbs at the same time. The
shake shake shake
of the wheels under you quiets the spirit, the monotony of sound quiets the soul, and the ever-changing scenery occupies the mind simply. Nothing remains in view long enough to hold on to. Another way of sleepwalking with your eyes wide open.

The Congressman doesn't dance attendance on me, but he makes his presence known. He brings an extra pillow, a glass of water, a cup of coffee. This morning when he offered the coffee, he allowed his fingers to brush over mine. It was the first time we had touched since we danced.

"Perhaps you'll take me dancing while we are in the Capital City," I venture.

"I don't think my fiancée would like that."

"I'm not sure that I like that you have a fiancée."

The Congressman laughed at that, big guffaws.

"Why are you laughing? Was she the gap-toothed girl you danced with after you danced with me, the last time we danced?"

"Yes."

"Had you asked her then?"

"No, then I was thinking of asking you."

I blushed; my cheeks, my breast turned scarlet. "You hoped I'd marry you?"

"Yes. Given the choice between being my wife or his mistress, I thought you might choose—wife."

"You should have asked me."

"If I had known how soon the opportunity would vanish, I might have done something different. I don't imagine you would prefer being my mistress to being his wife."

Sleeping on the train is like riding a horse. Except you don't feel the wind; you see it. Things pass you by so quickly, until you realize that things are not passing you by; you are passing by the things, the trees, the ponds, the people. The people don't pass you by; you pass them by, carried along by power you don't see, carried along on a track you didn't create, and there is no way of getting back to any one pretty piece of property. You are moving too quickly. And you are old enough to know that anything you have time enough to get back to, has time enough to change before you can get back to it. You are sad.

I want to get up from this bunk and go to him. I have more imagination than he. I can close my eyes and want to be that which he cannot imagine me preferring to be. I can prefer to be different than I am now. The worm does not imagine becoming a butterfly, but I have seen the worm and the butterfly, so I don't have to imagine.

Does the worm die and the butterfly is born where the worm was, or is it a continuous life, without stops? Or is it no life at all without thought, or memory, or an ability to cry out loud? Possessing only beauty, is the butterfly alive? I'm too tired to chase after my mind as it rambles. More in the morning.

Morning came, and I came crisp and clear with it. We are pulling into Washington soon. I must put you down to stroll these kinks out of my legs.

Betrayer! I leave you down and you tell him what I have whispered into your pages. I came back, and there he was, reading, intent on his reading.

I said, "Sir, you are no gentleman!"

He said, "You're right about that,
Cynara.
" He knew my name and called me by it. "I'm a man." He teased me, and it was infuriating. "A strong man, a statesman, a colored man, but I am proud to say I am no gentleman."

I spoke the verbal equivalent of a foot stamp. I pouted like the schoolgirl I had never been instead of the whorehouse maid I was. I couldn't stop myself from saying, in all petulance, "All the years I lived under his roof, he had respect for my privacy!"

He could only just stop himself from laughing at me. "No, you got that just about right the first time. He had respect for privacy; it's a gentlemanly principle and you were the beneficiary. He didn't have respect for you—respect for Negro women is not a tenet of the code of the Southern gentleman, but it's a tenet of mine."

A silence fell between us that I didn't get the measure of.

Time was freezing or expanding; it was doing something to get me and keep me lost. I can't tell you if it was the longest minute of my life or the shortest hour, but I was lost in it. When I found myself, I reached out for my book. He held you out toward me like bait. I reached for you, pulled you toward me, felt him holding on, then relinquishing. I seized you.