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Authors: Alice Randall

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BOOK: The Wind Done Gone
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My forehead sweats hot beads, my hands sweat cold. My nose is beige and my mother's black. I look at my fingers and sometimes I think the tips of them are purple. I look at my face and see a faint redness on the cheeks, as if a scarlet butterfly landed on my face while I was sleeping and left its rouging flying-dust.

Now what has Garlic told me? That he helped Planter win him in a card game by poisoning his old master, Planter's opponent. That he chose to work for Planter because Planter was an impotent man. Oh, God! What God do I now imagine in heaven? Where are his hair of gold and eyes of blue? My Daddy's eyes. The only God I knew built Cotton Farm, ran the slaves on this place. Now that ain't Planter. Ain't Daddy. Now what? Now Planter was a man without position or land who Garlic manipulated with his black hands into winning our land from another white man in a card game. Garlic the poisoner. I would laugh if it were not so sad. I would laugh if every laugh didn't jostle loose bitter burps of knowing, leaving vinegar vapor on my tongue, the only vestige of the illusion of my father's power.

31

I am leaving here today. The place where I was born. I wish I had not come back. The three little graves, the boys' graves, the heirs' graves. It's like this—Mama kill those children? Or not. Ain't sure which way I want it to be. I think I don't want her to have done it. And then I feel, if she did it, I know for sure she loved me. Loved me enough to kill. And it hard for someone who ain't a killer to kill.

Miss Priss told me long time ago of how Other and Mealy Mouth killed the soldier. Knifed him to death, on the steps, with his own sword. They pretended like they hadn't. But dark eyes see everything on a place like this. Or do they see nothing? I've seen nothing. I know how every inch of this place smells, and you can't change a place without changing its smell. I kinda loved her for killing that soldier. All of them did. They said he needed killing and couldn't be no black to do it, so they was glad Other did it. Mama rested easier with the smell of murder gone from the place. That's how we all knew Other wasn't a natural-born killer. And Mama and Garlic weren't neither, for the smell of killer was gone from the place when the soldier died.

How happy can I be? Must I cry? I believe I must go, and keep going. There is nothing left for me here. I've had no word from R.; she's had two formal, kind missives. What will I find back in Atlanta upon my return? An abandoned house? A place to work at Beauty's? What?

Garlic will make arrangements for me to leave. It will be easier for them when I am gone. And it will be easier for me.

32

Jeems rode me back to Atlanta behind his horse, Hannibal. It's strange to think of Jeems driving his own horse and not one belong to the Twins or to their place. It's stranger than the Twins being dead. We all knew one day they would die, but no one knew one day Jeems would drive his own horse. Jeems is a good-looking man. I wonder I ain't seen it before. I guess it's what a fine-looking man he's become. I wonder what he would have been if the Twins had survived the war. Something less.

He's built a house for himself and a church for the community, he tells me while we're riding, but did I see he's not settled? Did he seem less each time he swung down from the horse? And don't he look fine with reins in his hand? A hammer give not quite the same effect. But he's a farmer during the week and a preacher on Sunday. He milks his cow every day, and don't ride enough.

He told me all this and I laughed and tried not to laugh too hard. Ever since I heard Garlic's laugh, I've been laughing too much, off and on, all the time, like crying. Jeems, he watched me laugh.

"Ever think on getting married, gal?"

"You asking me?"

"Why should I akse you?"

I laughed again. There was no reason he would ask me. I knew and he knew I knew it. So he surprised me when he said, "Maybe I'm aksing you." I didn't laugh. The words jangled in my head like pennies in a jar—not enough to buy something with but enough for the sound to strangle thought. Nobody ever put that question to me. And I didn't expect to ever hear it on a ride down from the country to the city. From a man I ain't kissed. I'm greedy for a second serving of those words. I want a dessert of those words, a soup, a salad. I wanted to salt those words and snap them in like peanuts. But Jeems is a friend back to sugar-tit days.

"Don't ask me."

"I'm asking you. Will you marry me?"

"I'm not the marrying kind."

"You not or he ain't?"

"I ain't. My Mama never married. We don't marry."

"Too bad," Jeems said and he clucked the horse on.

We walked on down the road. "How's Miss Kareen?"

"Miss...?"

"Kareen."

"She's in a convent."

"I know that. In Charleston. How she be?"

"Why you ask 'bout her?"

"She was the one we really liked."

The words fall on me hard, like a blow—a smack across the face, a slap on my rumpass, leaving the bright red blood tattoo of a hand. "We—you mean the Twins?"

I thought it was Other they sniffed after. I thought the homefolks thought Kareen's moaning over B. was some kind of too much sorry-for-yourself play-acting.

"We all loved Sugarbaby. B. was fixin' fo to marry hua. Woulda, 'cept for Gettysburg. S. was sweet on yo' sister."

"I don't have a sister." I didn't get the words out to say S. nor any other Southern gentleman would marry a nigger, when Jeems interrupts with one sly, snarled word: "Yeah."

I was ashamed for Mama and ashamed for not knowing he knew. I knew who he meant. And I knew he knew I knew. Why do I get stuck in these little circles?

Mammy didn't marry; I suspect I won't either. He asked me if I had a reason. And I just stared at him, letting him take the answer to be no. But it's like this. Long ago. Long ago. How long ago? I don't even know. I stopped letting myself want anything I could not have.

Hours later Jeems pulled the carriage up in front of my house and I got out.

33

R. wanted to know who the boy was who had brought me back from Cotton Farm. I wanted to wince when he spoke "boy," but I answered, "Jeems," and gave him my smile. For the first time, the first time ever, I'm wondering what it was he did remember about before Emancipation. "You remember the Twins Other was sweet on?"

"Those big red-haired boys?"

"Them."

He nodded, but there was an unspoken question hiding in his smile.

"Jeems was their tenth birthday present. He was ten too."

"The Twins are dead now."

"Yeah, they are."

"Gettysburg."

"Gettsyburg."

Already R. had lost interest. He wasn't interested in slaves. I tried another smile, but my mouth sort of stuck to my teeth, and all I made was something that looked like snaggles peeking through half a moon. My face was changing. I wondered if he could see it yet. I smiled the half-broken smile that conceals. I achieved a fraction more. The edges of my lips were heavy, and I could feel the inside of my lips sticking to my teeth. Always, when I'm awkward or clumsy, I'm grateful for beauty which causes men not to notice my other imperfections.

I wanted to ask R. if he was grateful for my beauty, but I did not. Questions like that can only be written here. They can't breathe. Is he ever grateful for anything I do?

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.

BOOK: The Wind Done Gone
11.78Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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