75
Debt says all that's left of Mammy is me. He is polite enough to flinch as he says it. I ask him if he's imagining me fat and dark. He don't answer. He tells me about a dream Other used to have. A dream of hers. She was lost in a fog, running, looking for something, and she don't know what. Other never knew what she wanted, so she never had it even when she did. I ask him why he's still talking to me about her when she's buried in the ground. I say I know what I'm looking for. When I was a little girl I was looking for love. When they sold me off the place I was looking for safety. At Beauty's I was looking for propriety, and now, and now I have drunk from the pitcher of love, and the pitcher of safety, and the pitcher of propriety till I feel the water shaking in my ears. But thirst still burns. What I want now is what I always wanted and never knew—I want not to be exotic. I want to be the rule itself, not the exception that proves it. But I have no words to tell him that, and he has many feelings for me, but that is not one of them.
Later, I look at my reflection in the glass—and I try to see what he sees. I look for the colors. I see the blue veins in my breast. I see the dark honey shine of my skin, the plum color of my lips. I see the green of my eyes, and I see the full curve of my lips and the curl of my hair, and I know that it's not so very bad being a nigger—but you've got to be in the skin to know.
Am I still laughing? It is not in the pigment of my skin that my Negressness lies. It is not the color of my skin. It is the color of my mind, and my mind is dark, dusky, like a beautiful night. And Other, my part-sister, had the dusky blood but not the mind, not the memory. There must be something you can do or not do. Maybe if the memories are not teased forth, they are lost; maybe if the dance is not danced, you forget the patterns. I cannot go to London and forget my color. I don't want to. Not anymore.
76
I had never known him to be ignorant. But he is. He thinks like the others, the common tide. He thinks that the blackness is in the drop of blood, something of the body. I would have thought he knew enough women's bodies to know that that could not be true. And enough blacks and whites to know there is a difference. What did I suck in on Mammy's tit that made me black, and why did it not darken Other's berry? Was there some slight tinge, some darkening thing about Other? Lady's fortitude; Other's willingness to take to the field? And how does one explain the sisters except that part of the blood memory must be provoked and inspired and repaired, time and again, to become the memory.
This tied-up-in-ribbons gift I want from him, he has no picture in his head of what that gift looks like unwrapped. No picture at all. The lift of a hat, the dip of his back—those gestures would remain as they have been, but the bitter curve of his lip holding back a laugh that salutes all that is strange and lacking in harmony in me, in him, in us, would vanish. That curve in his lips, that spark in his eye of—truth—yes truth, there is so much in me strange and discordant. The notion of respecting me, as me, myself, would be, is, half foreign to his mind. No, no, not foreign; foreign is this coming week of travel, that idea is not foreign to him. Respect for me is foreign to me. Respect for me is an accomplishment of his, mine by gift, not mine by right. Absence and exoticism are such different keys of longing. He adores me, he has worshipped me, I believe he loves me, but never could the tone of his feeling be formed so that this cautious emotion, this sturdy food, "respect between equals," be what you called the way his heart turned toward mine.
It was always some warmer feeling, not the cold distance of temperance. I want his respect. I have fragments of it and fractions. He admires my mind. I have read more books than any woman he knows well. The way I break rhythms, the way I make rhythms, he yearns for the music of my way of telling, of being, of seeing. But now our love songs are played in two keys: grief and remorse. I prefer grief to remorse. Without mutuality, without empathy to join and precede sympathy, I am but a doll come to life. A pretty nigger doll dressed up in finery, hair pressed for play. I will be the solace of sorrow but not the solace of shame. I have been dropped too deeply into the shame bucket to borrow any that belongs to somebody else. I wrap my shame in his respectability, I let his arms wrap 'round my shoulders, his weight press me into a sense of place. His self plunging into my heart awakens me, and, with it, a weak humiliation I've known so long, an aching bruise it pleasures to touch.
And yet and still I have wanted this for a long time. It was my first woman's dream. I have wanted this for too long to walk away without the prize I have coveted. I will marry him. I will marry him. I believe I will marry my Debt.
I read what I have written, and I wonder if I am not deranged. There is such a distance between the words and the events. And a greater distance between my feelings and the events. My feelings are closer to the words. I have never felt close to the events, because I have never controlled them. Someone else has written the play. I wish I could think it was God. I merely take my place on the stage. I wish whoever was writing the action would send the Congressman to call.
77
If I will not play the role in London, Debt sees no reason for us to quit the country. If I am to remain colored, I can remain colored just as easily here. According to him! I don't believe colored is easy anywhere. But I'm pleased to be spared the sea voyage. Again I remember stories from the quarters when I was young and stories from the docks in Charleston, stories of men and women and children chained into the bowels of ships. I hear them crying down the century. There is a song that came from the ships. I heard the story. The slaves sang some old tune and the ship was lost at sea. The owner was a slaver from way back and deep in his soul his conscience clean. But the ship got caught up in a storm where storms don't come, and he thought he saw the hand of God when the lightning cracked in the darkness. And he prayed to God to save him. And God spoke to him. God said, "I ain't saving you ifn' I don't save the ship. And I ain't saving the ship lessen I save the Daddys, and I ain't saving the Daddys without the Mammas and I don't need the Mammas less I save the babies. You is less to me than spit. But if I save the babies, I'll save the Mammas." And God saved them all, and the man did not forget, Amazing grace! How sweet the sound of the slaves singing that saved a wretch like me. He once was lost but now he's found, was blind but now he sees. That happened to an Englishman; let it happen to me. Please Lord, let me see what it is that I want.
78
I woke up this morning and some strands of my hair were on my pillow, the red butterfly was on my face, and my bones ached where they came together, like somebody was splitting kindling on me, and I am tired. I am shaking when Rosie comes for a fitting; she gives me the address of an old conjure woman born herself on African soil who lives just on the east side of the Capitol building. The conjure woman tells me to lie down in a dark room, and I do. I'm like one of those creatures from the swamp, one of those ghosts who only ride at night. I sleep in the day and come out in the darkness.
Debt says we are to marry before we go home. I am too weak to say anything but yes.
79
Today was my wedding day. Strangers stood up for us. I believe they played Mendelssohn's wedding march. Rosie sewed my dress and didn't say a word. It was the golden color of sweet cream. When R. slipped the gold band onto my finger, I thought, I wish this had happened a long time ago—when I was still in love with Planter, when I still begrudged her every kiss she had off him. We return to Cotton Farm for the wedding trip. He says, "We should be home for Christmas." Where does he think that is?
80
Tata rises from the middle of Cotton Farm surrounded by its fields of sorrow. It is hard to get out of the carriage in this territory of truth and illusion.
The wide front doors are flanked by windows—sidelights, we call them. Over the door is the half-circle of a red Venetian glass fanlight; the diamond-shaped muntins surrounding the front door hold blue glass. "Muntins"; Lady taught me that word. I was born in a world of colored light and flickering shadows. I was born in the kitchen of a great house.
81
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br /> Garlic was waiting at the door. Outside it, really. He had on just his own new clothes, but he stood ramrod straight, as he had in his old before-the-freedom livery. After dinner Debt ceremoniously gave me the keys to the house, the house he had inherited from Other. Later that night Garlic took them from me. "Did you dream of this when you first came here?" I had to ask him that. Age had not stooped him. But when he stood with a hand tucked inside his shirt, it brought to mind Mr. Napoleon Bonaparte. "What didn't we dream of?" he responded. "What didn't we dream?"
82
We took supper in the dining room. Debt was irritated by every manner of small thing. He squinted at the bright light coming through the window where no curtains hung. And we shivered in the cold. "I'll burn this place to the ground it we can't get things 'round here the way they need to be for folks to live in it," R. roared. Garlic said, "Gold damask would suit the room well, sir." I agreed, and R. approved the funds for this and other renovations.
Some things were the same—the cool tile floor, alternating diamonds of light and darker gray, and, outside, a planting of periwinkle, a small evergreen vine that bears blue flowers, the scent of periwinkle and flowering almond reminding me of when I was his Cinnamon and she was his coffee.
83
I visited the cemetery today. I stood over the grave of my mother, then of my half-sister; I stood over the grave of my father, Planter. And then I knelt at the little boys' graves, the graves of his sons. Shall I always wonder if my mother and Garlic killed those children? And will I ever know? I asked Garlic directly, and he answered, "If we didn't, it was because we didn't have to." Sons would have challenged Garlic's authority over the house. "I wonder what problems I pose to you?" I asked. "None at the present time, none at the present time," he said. Then he stopped and pulled out my father's watch, the one Other had given him. His finger released the mechanism, and the face was revealed. His finger snapped the watch shut. "If you had been my child, this place would be yours, now, yours." Why did it seem so plainly Garlic's to give and take away? I wondered who had planted the tree just up from the gate, the tree that killed Planter when he smashed into it. I wondered how long some folk can watch and wait.
84
Christmas is coming. In the old days we'd be looking for the Yule logs now. The white folk thought there was only one—as long as the Yule log was burning, it was Christmas and nobody was whipped and nobody really worked 'cept those in the house. That was our hard times: when the house was full of guests needing cooking and looking after all the night, even the night before Christmas, but it was good foods and smells for kitchen folk too, and the field folk had a holiday by taking their rest. While the Yule log burned, things were different. So one log burned in the big house and another burned way out in the quarters. Out there somebody tended the ghost fire, burning the second log and maybe a third, to within an inch of the big house log—an inch bigger, an inch longer—but something close to it. We would trade the bigger log for the smaller. That way we kept Christmas longer.
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.
85
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.
86
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.
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