The Wind Done Gone (8 page)

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.

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 three 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.

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.

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?

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.

Where did I think I was going? Who did I think I was going to? I got a letter from the plantation—that's what it is really, not a cotton farm—in response to mine. Can I even remember who wrote it? Does it matter? None of them really write, so somebody said it to somebody who wrote it down. Then they send it to me. They don't want me. I'm not welcome. They say, "She still here." Other, they mean. "Mammy gone. Ain't no reason for you to come here now."

I know that; I got to laugh. Yeah. Now. Whoa. Garlic. Garlic doing what Garlic do, protect the place. I see it. If Other find me there, Other may fall in hate with the place. She may realize 'bout R. and me. May remember something about Lady and me. My slave fear falls in beside me. That old fear that should be getting old, turning brown and be easy to blow into the wind, is ever green like the earth is ever red. Garlic's scared, I'm scared, that old fear that what we love might be sold: Mamas, Daddys, children ... the place ... a dress ... anything we love.

It's an old confusion, people turning into things. When folks is gone (sold, dead, run-off), you got a corn husk doll, a walnut-shell ring, fingertips of dirt on the hem of a dress. It happened so much, maybe now things turn into people. The house, Tata—Garlic could hear it speak. All it contained of the brown lives it had eaten; it was a living thing. Garlic walks into the great hall of the house like R. pushes in between my thighs; his eyes scream, "Sugar walls, sugar walls." Everything sweats in the heat. Garlic won't permit anything that might provoke Other to sell the place. Won't put Cotton Farm at risk at all. It's his sacred place.

I come to see what I ain't seen before. Me on the place might taint it. Soon she'll come back to 'lanta, and I'll see what Garlic say then.

R. is involved in some kind of foreign currency exchange scheme. He came to know a good many foreign bankers during the war, when he was selling cotton on the foreign markets.

At home the pendulum seems to swing again, swinging away from the promise of real change: the change from little boys and little girls picking cotton to children reading and writing and wearing shoes and eating every day and one day getting to vote or getting to influence their father's or their brother's vote. It's like being pregnant. You are or you are not. A child has those things or does not. Conservative victories ended Congressional Reconstruction in Virginia before the state was admitted back into the Union—was it just last year? Was it 1870?

Reading or not, voting or not, these changes are small but necessary. They are the salt on the meat of our existence, eating or not, sheltered or not, living or not. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi—we're holding on to our votes there, even R.'s beloved South Carolina. When 1880 comes, I fear and he hopes, it will not look so very different for so very many from 1860.