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!
54
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.
55
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.
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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.
P., what does Haiti have to do with this? I have my little income from there and you have yours. It should buy us a little freedom. This all sounds like a nightmare my old Mammy used to tell me about ill-us
ed slaves coming to haunt families that were cruel to them. Sometimes they scared the people so bad, their hearts beat right out of their chests, then stopped beating at all. E.
Darling,
Your mother, my aunt, refuses to see me at all. I'm just about to go to the graveyard to talk with my mother. P.
***
E.
You must write. It's been days since I spoke with you. I come to your house and am refused entrance. Have the gates of hell opened and swallowed you whole? P.
***
P.
What do you know of Haiti? I don't believe I've ever seen it on a map. I don't believe I'll ever take another teaspoon of sugar in my life. Mother doesn't know that I know why she believes we can't marry. The reason doesn't constrain me. Doesn't shackle my heart from yours. But my tongue is locked in the prison of my mouth. You would have to make your own decision, and I do not know what you would decide, and if I tell you what I know, you will never be yourself again, and if I do not tell you, we will never be what we might be. If you wish to know, send word and I will tell you. Your cousin E.
Darling E.
Was our great-grandmother a murderess? Did she kill a hundred slaves because one displeased her? I refuse to be afraid or ashamed of decades-old indiscretions of my progenitors. Tell me at once, and I will be as I remain, who I am, the man who wants to marry you. P.
***
P.
Our great-grandmother was not a murderess. She was a Negresse. E.
***
Dear E.———,
I am surprised you put those words to paper. I am proud of you, very proud, and I should still like to marry you. I spoke with Aunt. Your mother sees no life for us that will not destroy the rest of the family. She says her confinement and the confinement of her sister, my mother, were agony, greatly lessened but not ended by the arrival of perfect pink infants. She says they watched the tips of our ears and ridge of skin around our fingers every night for signs of darkening. I asked her what she would have done if she had seen the tip of your ear turn the color of one of the walnuts just falling. Even if you had turned the color of butter, if she had turned the color of butter, I would have put the pillow on her face and I would have cried. Color comes in so slow over a period of ten days, if you do it quick even the Daddy don't see the dark in the baby. Of course the Mammy knows. They've seen all manner of white-looking nigger children. What farce this is. It's a pity Molière didn't live in this city and this part of the country. Instead of writing the Imaginary Invalid, he could have written the ... what would we call ourselves? Niggers Who Knew Not? Can you be a Negro if you don't know you're a Negro? I would have said a nigger knows he's a nigger. Always. Absolutely. But what if he doesn't? So ... we are each to pour a little more milk in the coffee and not tell. We were the ones who were not supposed ever to know—the first to be white not black with a secret. See how well our love serves us. If we had not fallen in love, we might never have discovered our darkness. P.
***
P.—— Write to me. I know you're in New Orleans. Everyone says you're drinking too much, fighting, dueling with anyone willing to walk across your shadow. You said you would never marry anyone but me—but you did not say you would marry me. Of course I wish I did not know what I know now. I wish I was not what I am now, but if I had to do it over again and I could either stay innocent or love you and hold for a minute the possibility of being your bride, I would choose knowledge and agony over innocence and no hope of marrying you. Could we not go someplace where no one knows us and be who we are? E.
***
Dear E.
Strange as it may seem, it is not as hard for me to imagine having a Negresse for my bride as it is for me to imagine you having a Negro for your husband and in your bed. It feels blasphemous. Even when I know the Negro so well and know his desire for you to be as hot and pure as fire. If you will marry me, I will marry you when I return. Perhaps we will move to a plantation down in the Indies. I have been sniffing around for possibilities down here. Port cities are good for possibilities. P.
***
Inside the last of the envelopes were two folded yellowing newspaper articles. One told the story of a deadly duel between hotheaded dandies down in the Quarter. The other the story of the premature death of a well-loved son of Savannah under mysterious circumstances. Same story, different tellers; only the fact of death remained.
57
Other never knew. R. received the letters from Garlic; he got the letters from Mammy. She got the letters from Lady. How Lady came to possess both sides of the most important correspondence of her life is not hard to imagine—she kept those he sent her and, rather than destroy anything her hand had touched or risk disclosure, he had returned hers to her. I could only imagine how many times Lady had read and re-read the words that did and didn't change her life. The pleasure must have been exquisite for her, to take so much risk with her daughters' lives, to risk the damage "an unveiling" would have done to her life. I can only imagine that when she handed the letters to Mammy, she expected Mammy to burn them. She expected the secret her mother never wished to tell her to die with her. She left her daughters to carry their babies without fear of their own children darkening up.
They're walking over my grave again. I know why Precious cried in the night. I remember finding the clothespin in her bed, the lemon oil on her elbows. I know all about whitening up; they did what they could for me.
I wonder why Garlic gave R. the letters. I wonder if he knew what they contained. He didn't read or write, and he wasn't a man to think words were important. I'll have to ask him, but I'm guessing that he left the letters for R. out of simple honesty, out of a desire to give him a gift. What a strange moon we are under. With this gift what has he robbed R. of? Or perhaps it was simple spitefulness.
Mammy might have told Garlic what the letters contained. He was too careful a man to let them be read by just anybody. If he had been curious, he would have asked me to read the letters to him. I don't believe he paid any attention to them at all. The letters were not the only things R. brought back with him from Cotton Farm. He also brought me a ring.
It was stone-less gold band without ornamentation. Inscribed on the underside were Lady and Feleepe's initials. R. raised my hand to his lips; I thought he was going to kiss it. Instead, he slipped the Charleston ring from my finger and dropped it into his watch pocket.
Old light, some yellow light, almost an ancestral light, flickered in R.'s eyes, now framed by creases, a hundred crinkling curved lines that changed, creating a sparkling effect as he dropped to his knee. He was slow and unsteady as he lowered himself, but he was certain of his destination. He looked like what he was—a courtier from an age gone by. I found the effect of effort wed to a feebleness endearing. Gallantry is never so visible as when it is doomed. I had a portrait in my mind of R.—a portrait of prosperity and beneficence—but a new portrait was forming in my mind—the portrait of a lonely man. The more he resembled this new portrait, the closer I came to falling in love with him.
58
The Congressman sent me flowers and a note that R. found charming. R. thanked me for helping him "cultivate" his "new friend." I let him think I was doing him a favor. The flowers were yellow roses and they reminded me of home. As I re-read these pages—and I do that more often than I write new ones these days—I find myself looking backward. I spent most of my life looking toward the front room of my life, toward escape or change, toward some new way to be, some new place to stand, some new person to stand with. And now, thirty years into my life, my life half over, I am always looking backward, trying to rearrange my memories, rearrange and dust, celebrate and protect, all those antique memories, sticks that came into the house of my mind without me paying them no mind at all, sticks that have become my treasure.
How is that? Once when I lived looking forward, I never thought about me or allowed myself to feel any thing but pleasure or joy. It was a kind of trick. My special trick; all other
feelings provoked an immediate invisible sleep. I appeared to be awake but I was gone and dreaming. It was a satisfying trick, and I performed it like a circus dog. I never remembered anything unkind, never remembered or indulged my jealousy. Living in my own little house which R. visited in Atlanta, I swept all darkness away immediately under the rug of my springy bangs. And now someone's pulled the rug away. In fact, I find more hair in my brush every day than I wish, and all those things I swept away have shown themselves to still be there. And I have no idea in the world what to do with those unpleasant memories.
How is it that the South, the world of chivalry and slavery and great white houses and red land and white cotton, is gone, forever gone, in the dust, blown off and away, and it is only in me and my memories and in my soul-carving fear that the Southland lives on? Carved or seared on my heart, why does it seem so completely unobscurable? Why do I remember what can never help me? Why do I remember my world better than I remember myself? So much I know about what I saw; so little I know about my own eyes. I'm tired. My bones are starting to ache. The butterfly sleeps softly crimson on my brown face, and I will sleep well tonight.
The Wind Done Gone Page 9