The Wind Done Gone (12 page)

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-used 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.

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.

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.

Was it just this morning we ate oysters for breakfast? I don't feel very well. I wonder if swallowing the pearl will kill me. It can't be the oysters. R. ate them too, and he feels fine. An old melody I made up in Cotton Farm days floats on the waves of nausea to the front of my brain. "The moon's all worn out and silver, trying to climb up the hill. The moon is just a sliver, I believe it never will. The moon I want to wish on, I'm waiting for it still." The moon that hangs outside the brick-faced window of our Georgetown townhouse is a worn-out sliver. I feel as exhausted as it looks. I hum the old melody and realize that I have hummed it before, because he, padding toward me in his silk dressing gown, is humming it too.

He came to me in the bed and we comforted each other. His white hair falling on my shoulder. I kissed his hairy ears and his crepe-y neck, I stroked his prosperity-swollen belly. He strokes the almost flat, still firm flesh of my stomach, and I wonder if I am going to have a baby. Sometimes morning sickness doesn't just come in the morning.

I never had any idea why no baby had come. It was just an unasked-for unthanked blessing. I have no hope. I hold no illusion that he would cradle my baby the way he cradled hers. I believe, I believed, I will continue to believe, that he loves me more than he loved her. That he loved me first and fiercer, that the very first time he saw her what drew him in was not her love for the fey one, the ephemeral boy-man, Dreamy Gentleman, but it was that she looked so much like me, looked like me but was a bright light-of-the day possibility. Dreamy Gentleman was the man his father and Charleston thought they wanted R. to be. Other was the prize to win that would prove He was more than He. But that is not why he wanted her; he wanted her as an echo of me. But I know this, this I remember, the men don't love the brown babies as they love the pale white ones.

Maybe some men do. I think of Garlic and how he never showed Other the fondness he showed me. I think of Mr. Frederick Douglass; he seemed proud indeed of his Ambassador son. I wonder about the Congressman. There's not much to wonder, is there? I blush to think of his happiness were he ever to discover his seed growing in my belly. I am not with child. I saw it this morning. I wonder if I can still make a baby. If I could ever make one. I never bled too much. We who clean the sheets and drawers know all about blood and talk about it too. You clean the sheets, you know a lot of things. It was never mine to wash the sheets at the plantation, but I washed my many at Beauty's; I am coming to feel I am a sheet-washing woman, a prelude to birth, a handmaid to birth, but not the creator herself.

I know he can have babies, because he gave Other one. I want a little loaf of my own rising in the oven. I cannot stay in this city here with him. It's too much. I have accepted the injustice of all of them loving her different because she was white. If she was just a nigger like me but got the chance to live white, it's too much to bear. But maybe that's just the way it is, so I'm broke. Right in half.

She was just a nigger. Their baby was just a high-yellow gal in a blue velvet riding habit. It's like she's died again. I ask him what it all means to him, and he makes a joke of it and says, "I guess they're right. Once you go black, you don't go back." He said that to me and I laughed, but he didn't think it was funny and I didn't either.

Lady. Lady love. Lady my love. Mamalady. What does it mean, river deep and summer green to me, that you are black and he was black, and you still wanted to marry him, and have his little may-be-brown babies? Could you have loved me just that much and I didn't know it? Was it always there for me to suck in on the tip of your pap and I didn't taste it, in your eye when you watched Other? In your eye when you watched Planter? The trick you played on him. And what about the trick you played on me? That I was one flavor and she was—other—and better than me? Other and better than my mother?

There was a day you almost told me. I must have been about six years old. Too old to be carried or lifted anymore. Old enough for more little jobs. You pronounced me "herb finder." When the overseer complained to Planter, "You wife is making a pet out of that pickaninny" and Planter tried to embarrass you by quoting the overseer's charges, you lied without hesitation, "Every fine family in Savannah has one, and what precisely does our overseer know about the care and feeding of a tribe of Southern aristocrats?" You held your chin up in the air when you said that; you let your voice shake with pride of birth. The husband could see for himself the blue blood pulsing in the vein of his wife's temple.