The Wind Done Gone

by Alice Randall

  87

  We are back in Atlanta. It seems so short and flat after the Capital. A place to move through, not a place to stay. A place that was not, a place that will be, but a place of friends. This is the only city in the world in which I have friends. Am I am ready to rest and be thankful?

  88

  I tiptoe into Beauty at breakfast this morning. Just looking at her makes me smile. She powders her face so white and dyes her hair so red, I expect to hear God shout down, "So you think you paint better than me!"

  "Mrs!" Beauty says out loud to me. I hold out my hand and wiggle my finger; the ring sparkles. She presses a cup of coffee into my hand and I too sip. "I wasn't jealous of you having him in your bed. I had that before you did, but I don't believe anybody's ever married me. I think I'd remember if they had." We both laughed.

  "I know you've been asked," I say.

  "Asked, yes, I've been asked but not by him, and he's the only one I'd give up my ladies for. For him and a proper ring, I might just have given up pussy."

  "You are too horrible," I say. If I could be scandalized, I would be.

  She hugs me. It's a way of saying congratulations, well done. She kisses me on the forehead and I kiss her on the lips. I am so tired of being alone, and Debt has not been true company for me in a long time, since before Precious died. We are just old times now. I kiss Beauty because Jeems is a glorified stable boy and the Congressman is far away and because we both love R. One way of looking at it, all women are niggers. For sure, every woman I ever knew was a nigger—whether she knew it or not.

  We dip toast into our coffee, and it is sacrament, benediction, and prayer.

  I go home and pray for more.

  89

  The Congressman sent his card 'round to me. I waited for him all the afternoon, and he did not come until evening, when R. received him and I sat in the drawing room keeping busy, not with my sewing but re-reading this diary. The men caught me at it. The Congressman feigned snatching it away. Mr. Chauffeur assured him that the sanctity of the little book would never be violated under his roof. The Congressman commended R.'s virtue, and I contradicted him. He possessed not virtue in surfeit, but curiosity in deficit.

  90

  Beauty and I were out in the shops together this afternoon. We passed the Congressman, and he lifted his hat and bowed in my direction. There was a sober look on his face and a smile of complete contentment that provoked restlessness in me. I want to taste what he tastes.

  91

  I am feeling a touch poorly. My joints are aching almost all the time now, and I must be clever with my hair; I've lost quite a bit of it. There is a doctor in Washington I particularly like. I've asked R. to make arrangements for me to see him. There's worry in R.'s eyes. His worry makes me worry more.

  92

  R. has asked the Congressman to accompany me back up to Washington, as he is going in that direction and R. is tied by business to this city. The Congressman has further suggested that I stay at the home of his sister, a Mrs. Harris who lives in Le Detroit Park near Howard University. I am alarmed to be so happy. Later, R. told me that he was touched by the Congressman's kindness and would seek to do business with the man even when he wasn't in office. "Some of them are rather fine sorts of men," R. says. "Not the finest, but fine."

  93

  The train has the same effect as a draught of laudanum. It excites and numbs at the same time. The shake shake shake of the wheels under you quiets the spirit, the monotony of sound quiets the soul, and the ever-changing scenery occupies the mind simply. Nothing remains in view long enough to hold on to. Another way of sleepwalking with your eyes wide open.

  The Congressman doesn't dance attendance on me, but he makes his presence known. He brings an extra pillow, a glass of water, a cup of coffee. This morning when he offered the coffee, he allowed his fingers to brush over mine. It was the first time we had touched since we danced.

  "Perhaps you'll take me dancing while we are in the Capital City," I venture.

  "I don't think my fiancée would like that."

  "I'm not sure that I like that you have a fiancée."

  The Congressman laughed at that, big guffaws.

  "Why are you laughing? Was she the gap-toothed girl you danced with after you danced with me, the last time we danced?"

  "Yes."

  "Had you asked her then?"

  "No, then I was thinking of asking you."

  I blushed; my cheeks, my breast turned scarlet. "You hoped I'd marry you?"

  "Yes. Given the choice between being my wife or his mistress, I thought you might choose—wife."

  "You should have asked me."

  "If I had known how soon the opportunity would vanish, I might have done something different. I don't imagine you would prefer being my mistress to being his wife."

  Sleeping on the train is like riding a horse. Except you don't feel the wind; you see it. Things pass you by so quickly, until you realize that things are not passing you by; you are passing by the things, the trees, the ponds, the people. The people don't pass you by; you pass them by, carried along by power you don't see, carried along on a track you didn't create, and there is no way of getting back to any one pretty piece of property. You are moving too quickly. And you are old enough to know that anything you have time enough to get back to, has time enough to change before you can get back to it. You are sad.

  I want to get up from this bunk and go to him. I have more imagination than he. I can close my eyes and want to be that which he cannot imagine me preferring to be. I can prefer to be different than I am now. The worm does not imagine becoming a butterfly, but I have seen the worm and the butterfly, so I don't have to imagine.

  Does the worm die and the butterfly is born where the worm was, or is it a continuous life, without stops? Or is it no life at all without thought, or memory, or an ability to cry out loud? Possessing only beauty, is the butterfly alive? I'm too tired to chase after my mind as it rambles. More in the morning.

  94

  Morning came, and I came crisp and clear with it. We are pulling into Washington soon. I must put you down to stroll these kinks out of my legs.

  95

  Betrayer! I leave you down and you tell him what I have whispered into your pages. I came back, and there he was, reading, intent on his reading.

  I said, "Sir, you are no gentleman!"

  He said, "You're right about that, Cynara." He knew my name and called me by it. "I'm a man." He teased me, and it was infuriating. "A strong man, a statesman, a colored man, but I am proud to say I am no gentleman."

  I spoke the verbal equivalent of a foot stamp. I pouted like the schoolgirl I had never been instead of the whorehouse maid I was. I couldn't stop myself from saying, in all petulance, "All the years I lived under his roof, he had respect for my privacy!"

  He could only just stop himself from laughing at me. "No, you got that just about right the first time. He had respect for privacy; it's a gentlemanly principle and you were the beneficiary. He didn't have respect for you—respect for Negro women is not a tenet of the code of the Southern gentleman, but it's a tenet of mine."

  A silence fell between us that I didn't get the measure of.

  Time was freezing or expanding; it was doing something to get me and keep me lost. I can't tell you if it was the longest minute of my life or the shortest hour, but I was lost in it. When I found myself, I reached out for my book. He held you out toward me like bait. I reached for you, pulled you toward me, felt him holding on, then relinquishing. I seized you.

  "Thank you," I said as formally as I could manage.

  He was trying to look right into me. "Don't thank me until you know I read it all."

  "You didn't have time to read it all," I snapped back. I didn't know what he had read. But whatever he had read, he was looking at me with sharper interest. It is thrilling to be known even when the knowledge is stolen, stolen like rubies.

  A price above rubies. A virtuous woman is worth a price
above rubies. I was a maid untouched when I came to R., and she, Other, was not. She had had two husbands and two babies. I pride myself on being the only colored gal I know who's had only one man and no children. I suspect the stream of my passion is so powerful because I have shored it up so narrowly. No diversions, no creeks, no tributaries of any kind, have been allowed. This man before me could change all this.

  I "merit a price above rubies." Were those R.'s words the night he bought me? What can those words mean to me now, today, to a woman pulling into the B & O depot accompanied by a Congressman? I was pleased that the train was pulling into the station. We had things to do other than the things I wanted to do, and I was pleased for that. He told me, in a tone that rude people reserve for servants, that we had many preparations to make before getting off the train. In a curt tone I never use, I suggested that he get on about it. Looking as if he wanted to slap me, he called for a servant and withdrew. Being careless with my packing, I stole time to write in you, traitor.

  96

  We traveled to his sister's in the northwest quadrant of the city in a hired carriage and in silence. We had never been so alone before. I had never been so alone with any man aside from my Debt. It was exciting to be so close and to withhold—everything. I am the river, and I am the dam about to burst. I will win if my walls hold strong, I will win if my passion burst through; either way is victory. I have never been in this position before in my life; either way I turn, I win. Until now my virtue has been unreal—never tested. Now in this man I have a true desire and a true question; the pleasure is exquisite. Exquisite; this is the wash of freedom. It has nothing to do with politics or elections. It has to do with having many things you want and being free to choose between them or free not to choose and remaining safely the same.

  A Negro woman who would not change her position. This is a novelty. We have not liked where we were, even when we didn't know what or how to change, when we simply dreamed of flying away, I'll fly away, I'll fly away, when I die. But I imagine flying away into his arms, dying to be reborn again, and dying again and again, waking after each little death into new pleasures. But it is not imagining; it is remembering from long ago with the faces changed. I am a maiden no longer. We arrived at his sister's house without speaking a word. But his eyes told me, his eyes told me, he saw me beautiful, and my whole self told him, I hear you, and I like so very much what I hear.

  97

  She wasn't there. The whole family was out. He showed me to my room, and I took my hat from my head, pulling out the pin; then I loosed my hair from the tight ball that was making my head ache. I turned back toward the door; he was looking at me, a suitcase in each hand. His sister does not keep servants. I walked toward him but only in the sense that a piece of metal jumps toward a magnet. I was drawn. I was pulled. I took my suitcases with my own hands from his, turned my face toward his, opened my mouth wide. I waited for his lips. It was a wanton gesture. The first wanton gesture of my life. A gesture I had scorned when I had seen it in the whorehouse. He did not disappoint me. Lord, he did not disappoint me at all.

  98

  I have done what I would not have done had I contemplated it longer. I'm terrified. Moving to being a woman of his, I have found myself in the neighborhood of Beauty's girls, the women with more than one man. And then it is nothing at all like that or anything else I have known, this exquisite chaos.

  This is what the psalmist was writing about in the Song of Songs. I recognize it at once. And I am afraid, not of his finding out, but of being this new person, a less than perfect person who has violated one of her most dearly held principles, and a person who has never felt such pleasure, a person I have never read about in books.

  The pleasure of his body and the pleasure of his knowing me has carried me into some sacred territory I did not know existed. The mystery of making love to myself, for he is me, and I am he, and I know all that he and she want. In the church of this sex I am the preacher and the congregation. He is the preacher and I am the congregation. I am the preacher and he is the congregation. The call becomes the response and the response the call, and I am shouting and falling out. Eager to let the old Cinnamon die and let the new Cynara be born all the nights to come.

  This is a sweet thing, sweeter than anything I have ever known. If there is anything better than being a free nigger on Saturday night, it's being a free Negro on Sunday morning; in his sister's bed I have my cake and eat it too.

  99

  We strolled out and about in the neigborhood later, easily arm and arm. No one much knows me up here. Many bob their heads, as if to say what a handsome couple. This is a new experience for me, but it is a familiar one for him. I don't have to ask him to know that he has never in his life touched a white woman, would not dream of kissing one, and that if he did dream of it, it would be an act of defiance, not of desire. It is less comfort, much less comfort, to realize he has an eye for all the chocolate, and the caramel, and the coffee-colored beauties on these streets, sashaying out to enjoy their freedom. He likes to look at pretty women; he allows himself the luxury of resting his eyes on their faces. I let my elbow find its way into his ribs.

  "God wouldn't a made women so beautiful if He didn't want men to take a moment to enjoy the beauty He created! Lord knows you women don't care enough about your own appearance to be peeking in any mirrors.

  I laugh at the silliness he wraps around some of his sharper truths. I am the only dark woman R. notices. I should find comfort in that fact but it—discomfits me.

  Many folks recognize the Congressman, men in overalls, men in hats; he treats all alike and bows to them slightly. If there's a baby in arms, he threatens to kiss it, then shakes his head, walking forward and announcing, "Too much innocence for me to taint."

  R. is a rich man and perhaps a powerful one. My Congressman is a famous man and perhaps a powerful one. I'm beginning to discern the differences and how they might matter to me.

  100

  He asks me about my sister, Other. I have nothing more to say. I am bored with that story. Today is the day I go to see the doctor. There is no one else for him. The girl I saw dancing with him so long ago is an old friend of his family he might have married had he not met me.

  101

  The doctor, one of the first colored doctors in the country, had not very much to say—except he's seen my butterfly before and with it the aches in the bone—but there are other things I do not feel and that make him hopeful. He says the tired comes and goes. He says sometimes people die. He says I'm lucky I didn't have a baby, because sometimes that makes it worse.

  Through this all he was more reserved than he had been before. Quite a bit more reserved. In fact, it took a few days for me to get the appointment. Finally, after the examination, when I was dressed and about to leave, he cleared his throat and said what I believe he had been trying to say all the while.

  "Madam, when I first met you I was impressed by your deportment." (I would rather he had said intelligence and simple grace.) "You were in a difficult position, but you handled yourself with modesty. (I would rather he had modified the modesty perhaps by adding simplicity, humble modesty.) "All eyes could see that you were in the best and the worst sense of the word married. But you bore the yoke with..." (Did he call it grace?) "When you married, we were happy for you. Every Negro man who had a mother forced or cajoled by the master raised a cup to your victory. But now you come to town with no husband, only an intent on sullying the good name of one of the great dark men in the Capital City. I can't but join my fellow citizens in disapproving."

  "I don't think you know anything of my situation."

  "I can smell him on you."

  It was the most vulgar sentence I had ever had spat at me. I know what he meant. I had washed the linen at Beauty's. Being a doctor is another kind of washing of the bedsheets.

  "He will never be elected again if he keeps up with you. Voting Negroes won't vote for a man living with another man's wife." I tried to interrupt h
im, but he wouldn't be stopped. "Whoever you think you are, in the polite society of Negro teachers and preachers and lawyers and doctors, you will always be the Confederate's concubine." He was on a roll. "You have a greater chance of being accepted among old white families than new colored ones." And he kept on going. "We're a prim and proper lot."

  I hadn't thought of this. I hadn't thought of very much at all.

  102

  My business in Washington is complete. I should return by the first train to Atlanta. It would be the sensible thing to do, and I am a sensible woman. No lady in any novel I know makes the kind of mistakes in books that I make in life. In all the literature I know, only one book comes close to what I feel. This is Great Expectations. Pip has a guilty family. Almost guiltier than mine. What is owed the rescuer? Do we always fall in love with those who rescue us? Didn't I know Miss Havisham in calico? What don't Estella and Other have in common? How easily Pip accepted his good fortune. I envy white boys that most of all—their certainty that they're going to be or get lucky. It occurs to them to live with great expectations. It occurs to them to do what they want and not worry about it. It occurs to R. to do that all the time. It doesn't occur to me at all. It occurs to me to run back to Atlanta.

  103

  R. has moved back into Other's house. Her children are there, and they need him. There's the grand staircase he once carried her up—and too many rooms to count. This is where we huddled together when Precious died.