When Other got sick to death of all that hating, she decided the indignities were not so very awful. The lie worked. She forgave herself, she forgave the other little white girls who formed her circle of visitors, and she forgave Mammy.
Against her sisters and her closest friends, she claimed and held a grudge. Folk always found fault with Other for having precious few female friends. Mealy Mouth had aplenty; Other had few. Certainly it was true that most of Other's many enemies were female. But Other liked girls real good. I almost think the reason she loved Dreamy Gentleman so, was that there was so much boy in his man and so much girl in his boy. No, it would have been nearer to the truth to say Other didn't like to have anyone around who made Mammy's life a misery, and it was the girls close enough to demand intimate services that did the best job of that. Particularly her sisters. Particularly that bright beauty, China, whose beau she stole when she married Mealy Mouth's youngest brother. So she treated those girls, the ones who might have been her intimates, bad enough for them to stay away, stay clear, stay distant—from her, and stay distant from Mammy, stay distant from her and Mammy. The possibility of life without Mammy she did not consider.
If Other bore her discomfort with little grace, Mammy bore it with less. Mammy gained fifty pounds one year, forty the next, twenty the year after that, and the slight, barely hundred-pound body in which she had walked into the house and slipped into Planter's bed vanished beneath another hundred pounds of protective flesh. I believe Mammy felt Other pulling away from her, and she determined to pull away from Planter before he could pull away. Overnight, Mammy became a stout old woman of fifty.
Lady was ripe then, thirty, and maybe she was just a little hungry for what she hadn't known when Planter, stone drunk, ploughed into her stone-dry and laudanum-drugged body. She had felt no pleasure, had given no pleasure, felt no pain, gave no pain, as he flopped about, planting his seed in her soil. These were the days when she began to wonder if there might could be something more to these engagements. She was beginning to forget her girlhood.
At the same time Other was becoming uncomfortable with Mammy, she began to fall deeply in love with her mother, my Lady. I wanted to dash her brains out with a big rock. Other and Lady and Me. As they discovered each other, I discovered the higher temperatures of jealousy. The fever comes in different degrees. Other's love for Lady's tidy, tiny, sweet-smelling self, her slight but supple arms, the white, heaven—pillow bosom that lay corseted beneath Lady's modest gowns, brought sweat to my brow. It was a comfort to know, it remains a comfort to know, that Other died without ever once seeing her mother's breasts, breasts on which I sucked.
And Planter was beginning to see me anew. There was nothing strange between him and me. I was his daughter, and that meant more to him than it did to most men of his time and station when the daughter was brown. But the way he looked at me, Mammy didn't know if she was nervous or jealous. And not for the first time Lady felt the exact same thing.
Back then, I was hating Other so hard for breaking the ribbons binding Lady to me that I noticed all of this, but I didn't weave it into the fabric of my understanding of my life. Yet circumstance has left me rich in time to think about those days. Not working is a severe affliction. If I had been turned out to field work, perhaps I would never have whipped up so hard on my own mind. But everything changed when Other fell out of love with Mammy and in love with Lady. Everything changed when Lady fell out of love with me. Everything changed when Planter noticed that I was some kind of cross between his wife and his woman. Everything changed, and they sent me away.
I could see in Other's face the first moment it came to her the possibility that Mammy did for her not because she wanted to, but because she had to. Maybe Mammy loved her and maybe Mammy didn't. Slavery made it impossible for Other to know. "She who ain't free not to love, ain't free to love." Some folks are easy with that and some folks are not. Mainly the folks who think they wouldn't be loved are easy with it.
What Lady did for me, she did freely. And what she did for Other was done that way too. So I for sure got something. I can't decide if I'm grateful that R. will finally never have to choose between us, between me and Other. Sometimes when I feel neither lucky nor worthy, I'm grateful to get the win any way I get it. Sometimes I can taste beating her out and I am sad to be starved of it. Sometimes it feels like the game is over and I'm putting up the checkers, and instead of me winning, she just lost, or more like she never showed up. And that's something else altogether from the way I want to feel, triumphant! Winner-ly. However it happened, I'm just glad not to lose.
Other is dead, and I'm sorry for it.
50
I want to go to Mr. Frederick Douglass's house and I wouldn't be sorry to go without R. if I could go in propriety. I like moving among these Capital City Negroes. I met a young seamstress who mainly sews for white families, but she's going to do a bit of work for me. Rosie Woodruff is her name. There is something in this quick, trim African lady, something so city-like but clean that I had to drop my eyes to keep her from seeing that it was me who is admiring her. She wore a pitifully slim gold ring on her finger, and a skinnier brown-skin man was waiting for her at home, a plumber who came very lately from someplace deep South and had quick picked up a trade. Compared to this seamstress I have so much—or is it so little? Home feels far away. Every mile of the distance feels safe and getting safer. And every mile and hour it feels like something more of me is missing.
51
Today I walked around the monument to President Washington. It's a half-finished thing, an odd white thumb coming up out of dirt and a few blades of grass, a stump of a thing, blasting through the dome of a cracked-in-two shell of sky.
The light in this city is so different from the light at the farm in Georgia, from the light in Charleston. The sky here is colored the blue of a robin's egg if the shell had been heated up with yolk-colored, straight-from-heaven sunrays. Always about me now is the sense of having died and gone to heaven.
Or died and gone to hell. Died for sure. There is a thickness to the Washington air. It's heavy with water and mosquitoes. I wear this air like a coat that keeps me from the cold I know is coming. And there's a thickness to the river. You can't see very deep into it for all that it carries, and it's wide. The Potomac seems to roll in here from someplace and curve slowly through the city like it's a good place to stay.
When I sailed to Europe I did not remember my fear of water until I was upon it for some days. Or was it Mammy's fear I remembered? Or Mammy's Mammy's fear? Where does fear go to become fascination? Is it where rivers go to become sea? More than anything I saw of Venice (gondolas, masks), of London (pints, a palace), of Paris (sewer rats, stained glass) after so much land, I saw all the rivers. The Potomac brings back to me a remembrance of rivers. A remembrance of rivers and river cities.
Walking along the streets I hear different languages. And the people dress differently not just because they are rich or poor but because the people of Atlanta dress differently from the people of Boston, who dress differently from the Philadelphians and there is a good bit of everybody roving 'round here.
In a way Washington, the Capital City, feels like an island. It belongs to nothing. I wonder what will be here in a hundred years? I wonder if anything will be here at all. The city is like a big pregnant woman lying on her side while everybody fans her and wonders when she's going to give birth. Or will the baby blast the life out of her, trying to press its way into life? We hear stories about the French L'Enfant and the black man, Banneker, who was his assistant, and how they were tossed out of their own vision, out of this town of their creation, for dreaming too wildly. Are there tame dreams? I wonder if this city with its strange circles, somehow designed to make one cannon do the work of six, but not generally sensible, I wonder if this city won't always be a kind of haint, struggling to wake to the everyday needs of a struggling rural people, struggling to fall back into L'Enfant's grand dream of a city of Senators and Ambassadors
? Did he not understand our Congressmen were not so long ago farmers and slaves? He didn't know that. I don't believe the European ever fully understands the American. But this city is built for tomorrow, and tomorrow I go the Douglasses' for tea.
52
I went to the Douglasses' for tea. Their home is more than a bit out of the way. Perched in the southeast quadrant of the city, high above a riverbank, Cedar Hill rewards the adventurous sojourner with a superb view across the Anacostia to the Federal city.
It's a new kind of home for me. There was a comfortable expanse but no formality—in the architecture. The formality was in the language, and now I borrow it for mine.
Was this the first party in my life I had attended alone, unescorted? Has any other woman in the world arrived at a formal party on her own? I surprised myself by going; I surprised a few of the other guests, I expect. And I was glad I did, from the moment a gap-toothed girl with an intelligent smile, gold-rimmed glasses, and long puffy-kinky hair opened the door and waved me in to join the crowd.
The party revolved around an immense cut-glass punch bowl filled to the brim with what tasted to be a mixture of fruit juice and tea. This bowl sat in the middle of a draped round table in a square entry hall. There were no big crystal bowls of flowers and no waiters, just shining faces and everyone helping themselves.
In the corner of the drawing room three young women from Fisk University in Nashville gave an impromptu rendition of "Soon I Will Be Done with the Troubles of the World," and this afternoon I felt I wouldn't have to leave this earth for it to be true.
We, Frederick Douglass and I, barely exchanged three sentences, but he looked at me as they sang, and I could see that he liked what he saw. As I was making my way through the crowd (so many sky-blue, so many cardinal-colored gowns—the effect—due to the new dyes—was quite unintentionally patriotic) after the song, twice the great man nodded as he smiled in my direction.
I never got too close to Douglass again, but I enjoyed a lively conversation with his son. I enjoyed this party. It was a kind of Negro open house, the kind of event to which I am not frequently invited. Mulatto mistresses of Confederate aristocrats have little standing in Negro society. And the Congressman was there.
God was showing off the day He created the Congressman. He is that good-looking. Or maybe God was just taking a stand. Who will deny the humanity of such a body, such a mind?
When the Congressman raised my hand to his lips, to kiss in greeting, I shook so hard, I was embarrassed. I flushed. I don't remember what words he said. But he offered me his arm, and we walked together into the Douglasses' garden. As we walked, he talked. He said some surprising things.
The girls from Fisk, teased again into song, had launched into "Go Down, Moses." I was amazed by their performance—the haunting combination of the raw and the refined. I told him so.
"Be not amazed," chastised the Congressman. "Be not amazed."
"They will amaze the Queen. Why not me?"
"Who is Victoria compared to you? You've seen more than she. We see it daily. We are the chosen ones, the ones who sometimes snatch victory from the jaws of tragedy."
"To what tragedy do you refer?"
"Do you require a particular tragedy?" For a moment he allowed himself the pleasure of being amused by the rhetorical question; then he waxed earnest. "Until it is transformed by our own energy, our own muscle, our own brain, every second of our very existence on these shores is tragic."
I hated hearing those words. I wanted to put my hand on his mouth and whisper, "Hush." Like I was Mama and he was Baby. But he's a man and I'm no mother, and he just kept talking. "And once transformed, even the least little bit, one drop of transformation, in the entire body of a life, makes the life victorious."
He touched the hard round muscle in the top of my arm, that golden hill of my inheritance, legacy of my childhood labor. Then he kissed his fingertips and pressed the kiss to my arm.
The release was as powerful as a little death on the green velvet couch. I was tired and wanting to hear more. He told more: "Just like one drop of blackness in the entire body of a man make him black."
What would it be like to have a drop of him in me? To keep from fainting, I changed the subject and gave him my most frozen smile.
Now he talked to me of the events of the day, expecting me to be proud of his accomplishments. I didn't know enough of the events of the day to truly value his part, but I knew enough of men to value the way he held hisself—the way even Douglass deferred to him and leaned closer to hear what the Congressman had to say when he allowed his voice to drop down low.
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.
53
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 coul
d 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.
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