The Wind Done Gone (2 page)

Even Other called Mammy out of her name. Other, who loved my mother; Other, who ran to her Mammy like I never seen nobody run to anybody, or anything, for the more significant matter, ran to Mammy like she was couch and pillow, blanket and mattress, prayer and God. Other rested her head on Mammy's brown pillow breasts, snuggled in beneath a blanket of fat brown arm, breathed in the prayer of Mammy's breath and out the god of her presence, never came to know there was any reason to give Mammy Planter's watch. So Garlic got it. Garlic wears it. Other owns Mother by more than ink and law.

This is my book. If I die tomorrow, nobody'll remember me except maybe somebody who find this book. I read
Uncle Toms Cabin.
I didn't see me in it. Uncle Tom sounded just like Jesus to me, in costume. I don't want to go in disguise. I don't want to write no novel. I'm just afraid of forgetting. I don't talk to anybody save Beauty and a few folks, so nobody remembers what I am thinking. If I forget my real name, won't be anybody to tell it to me. No one here knows. I'm going to write down everything. Something like Mr. Frederick Douglass.

 

R. visits my house more now, much more than he did before he quit Other. These days the sun sets with him sitting on my long wide porch turned toward the sideyard. Many nights now, he sleeps here. He says, "I love this house." I say, "You designed it." I don't say, "And you paid for it," but that's another reason to love a thing. He says, "It's quieter than the other house." He doesn't speak her name. The architecture of my home is a bow to R. and what he remembers of the houses of Charleston. I don't want to remember anything of Charleston at all, but the houses were cool, and R. wouldn't approve a cupola for the hot air to rise into, so I have turned my house away from the street.

It's a pity my street sees only the short side of me. It's a lovely brown street that didn't exist, even in dreams, before the war. There's a new church for the colored, First Congregational, a colored druggist, colored grocers, colored undertakers, colored schoolteachers down from Canada. Thanks to white women who want to improve the lot of what they are always calling "our children," R. is not, when he stays over, the street's only white resident. And I'm not sure how long he will be its only millionaire. There's a dusky man lives on this road who sells insurance. Many folk believe that man will someday soon be a millionaire. And there's more than one university for colored people springing up. With R. here more, I miss some of the neighborhood gossip, but I catch some from across town. There's a drink like something a root doctor would make, dark, with bubbles all sugared up to keep the swamp taste down, and the white folk are paying plenty pretty money to drink it. I've never tasted it. Only white folk go into the pharmacy where they sell it. R. says he's going to bring me a taste.

I almost never hear from Cotton Farm. More and more rarely someone will stop by my kitchen window and call, "Homefolks say hey." They can't write, and I don't expect them to. So when the letter came, I was afraid of tearing its seal.

Mammy is dying and she want me to come home before she go. I ain't saying yes, and I ain't saying no. I'm saying, I ain't stood on Cotton Farm since I was still saying
ain't,
and I don't know if I want to go back there.

Mammy is dying surrounded by homefolks. I got no feet to take me there. Mammy is dying and I don't want to go home. No more than she ever wanted to come see me under this fine roof. Mammy is dying and I want to touch her but I don't want her to touch me.

I'm going to die one day; this is telling me that. When I was a girl, I say to myself, "I won't hold you when your hair turn gray and your skin turn gray, when your eyes glaze over blue like old folks' eyes do. I won't make a pillow for your head. I seen rheumy eyes like hardboiled eggs, deep green circles glazed over white, and I think those will be your eyes one day. I won't hold you and I will never eat eggs again." Like a prayer of protection I said those things, and now it is not the threat I meant it to be. It's just a prescient prophecy, just a curse on me.

Mammy, Mama, I have no more idea how to hold you old than you had how to hold me young. All I got is ambition to love you more than you loved me.

Last night I dreamed of Cotton Farm.

I was serving at table, pulling the silken cord of the shoofly as guests dined, as they spoke of shopping in New Orleans, of buying furniture, and wallpaper, and silver. As they ate Mammy's dinner, I pulled the cord again and again; the cord pulled the silk brocade flap cantilevered above the table and fanned the guests from Savannah and Annapolis. As I performed my duty, I heard planters speak of turning cotton into silver. Someone pronounced "alchemy of slavery," and a shining coffeepot, candlesticks, and saltcellars changed before my dreaming eyes into little piles of cotton balls flecked with seed. Then I looked at my arms, and they changed too. The two golden brown little hills, one in the top of each of my arms, grew into little mountains as I pulled the cord and Mammy smiled, passing the green beans.

As I continued to fan and the guests continued to eat, Other appeared at the table, and the wallpaper began to move. In my dream, just as in life, the dining room wallpaper is painted all over with the story of Telemachus, in the land of the enchantress Calypso, searching for his father, Odysseus. Garlic once told me he had seen paper just like it in the home of President Jackson. I didn't believe him. Presidents don't invite folk like Planter to dinner. At eleven I'd seen enough of "the quality" to know that. But I liked his story. And in life I liked the wallpaper. In my dream it wouldn't stop moving, and I started to hate it. Didn't I know what it was like to live in the land of an enchantress and to long for your father?

My eyes turned from the wallpaper to the windows, my arm still pulling, still fanning. There were many windows. The house was built to let the outside in, the fragrance of peach and plum, the outside light after it is tinted by the colored glass of the windows. But I am inside looking out, toward the distant cabins.

Through the pink glass I see black smoke from a cabin chimney. I see into the cabin itself: I see a baby gently rocked in the arms of her mother.

I am still fanning as my mother serves Other a choice piece of dark meat. There is a painted porcelain bonbon dish on the sideboard behind them. It falls from the sideboard and shatters. Over and over it falls. And I keep fanning.

I wake up screaming. R. says, Strong meat tastes sweet.

If I go back there, I'm going to get my Daddy's watch and have it engraved to read,
TO R.B. FROM M.E.
I don't feel like laughing, but I can just see R. laughing at my joke. I can just see him open the satin-lined leather box. He'll understand; he expects me to play with letters. He taught me how to read in bed. I praised him for it. His stomach was my first paper, lip rouge was my pencil, and the cleaning rag was my tongue. We learned me well. R. gave me the tools. I learned to write, right on his belly.

He's used to buying women and ladies and buying them jewelry. I'm going to give him some of his own back. I like to give R. things. I like to give him what he's used to paying for.

Sometimes when we are in bed and he's sucking on one of my breast, pulling hard and steady so the pull only brings me the pleasure, sometimes when he's nursing on me, I smile, because he can't get what he wants here. I'm dry. But I let him suck himself to sleep. And sometimes there comes over his face a look of peace. Sometimes when I'm riding astride him and my gals dangle toward his face, he snaps at them like the foxes snapping at grapes dangling just above their mouths, and I laugh. Once, just after that, he pushed so hard into me that something broke inside and we were touching without anything between us, like a fever came over me, and he had the same sickness. Then I closed my eyes and I saw Other.

She was old enough to walk. She walked right past me, past Lady, she walked right past Lady and me, over to Mammy, reached up for Mammy, and my Mama reached down to pull Other up onto her hip. Other reached into the top of Mammy's dress and pulled out my mother's breast. "I want some titty-tip," she said, and I ached in some place I didn't know I had, where my heart should have been but wasn't. I've come to believe that was the very first time I ever felt my soul, and it was having a spasm. It clinched again, pushing the air out of me in a hiccup. I flushed in a rage of possession as those little white hands drew the nipple toward the little pink mouth, then clasped on.

I turned to see the delicate Lady. She was clutching at her cinched waist and staggering back. I ran toward her; she steadied herself, using my head as a kind of crutch or prop. I started fanning the flies off her and I kept fanning.

Wasn't it then Planter walked out on the whitewashed porch and smiled? Did he say, "My peculiar heaven, my peculiar, particular heaven"? I believe that's what he said. That's what he says when I remember it. His frail wife near faints and is fanned by the fairest of pretty pickaninnies, M.E., and he's pronouncing, "My peculiar heaven."

The rosebud mouth attached to the black moon in the brown breast, the curving back of the loving woman lifting the child to her pleasures, as the child, awake, untouched by stays and hoops, stands on tippy-toe to get her fill of pleasure, all raven-haired and unashamed of hunger. Him laughed. For his first-born daughter the pangs of hunger were as delightful as a mosquito bite, something to scratch in the next moment, the promise of pleasure to come.

He didn't see me hiding behind Lady's skirts or see the look Mammy gave me over Other's head. Planter only saw his daughter taking pleasure where he himself had done.

Now I'm grown, I wonder what Lady saw. She was just the oldest child on the porch, seventeen, with a three-year-old daughter. Never certain of feeding, I did not welcome hunger. I looked and wanted to suck; Lady looked and wanted to suckle-feed. We were both envious.

Later, when it looked like the four o'clock flowers opened their faces to the sun, but really when they smiled their relief to the arriving shade, when the baby of the house, Other, slept on a cool soft pallet and I tried to sleep on a hot rug in the kitchen, Lady called for a basin of water and a glass of sweet milk, and I was roused to serve it.

Or was it when Other was napping on a pallet in her room and I was one of the children fanning the flies away from little Miss while she slept, that Lady called from the next room, "Mammy, send Cindy up with some cool water and a glass of sweet milk. I'm thirsty and I want a sponge bath." I walked in with what she wanted. Lady made herself comfortable in her rocking chair. "Are you hungry?" I nodded. She handed me the glass of milk. I hesitated. "You can drink it." I took the glass and drank. She took the glass from my hand and drank right after me. I was surprised. Really I was astounded. I didn't know the word then, but that's what I was.

"Help me unbutton my dress; I want to wash." I helped her take off her dress. Her bared breast was just a little thing with a dented nipple almost as big as the circle it stood in. The circle was that tiny. "Are you still hungry?" I nodded again.

She pulled me onto her lap and I suckled at her breast till her warm milk filled me. As always, it was a cheering surprise for both of us. We had been sharing these little spurred-by-envy suppers all my memory, but each time the milk came and how long it came without running out was a mystery to us both. Later, when I slept beside her, she said, "You're my little girl, aren't you?"

Mammy worked from can't-see in the morning to can't-see at night, in that great whitewashed wide-columned house surrounded by curvy furrowed fields. The mud, the dirt, was so red, when you looked at the cotton blooming in a field it brought to mind a sleeping gown after childbirth—all soft white cotton and blood.

If it was mine to be able to paint pictures, if I possessed the gift of painting, I would paint a cotton gown balled up and thrown into a corner waiting to be washed, and I would call it "Georgia."

Mammy never knew rest, but she is no fool. I believe she knows why R. doesn't give a damn about Other anymore. Mammy knows that he's in love with me, and after the Tragedy there's nothing to keep us apart.

The Tragedy, yes, that is what it was. I cried when that child died. R. thought she was beautiful, and Other thought she was spoilt. Neither one of them was right. Everything that was gold and bold lived big in Precious. She looked too much like my Daddy to be pretty. Except when she kissed me and I would pull her curls. Precious: that's what I called her. Her grandfather would look right through me, but she would run to me and throw her arms around my waist. I got his hugs from her, and they were sweet to me, precious. She gave me my Daddy's kisses. She was his grandchild and they were my kisses, and her mouth looked just like his mouth. Not like Other's or Lady's or R.'s. She had Planter's mouth, and she gave me Planter's kisses.

The night Precious died, R. tried to plant a child in me. Most every other time, he pulled out, making a mess on my belly that shamed me. He didn't want any bastards, beige or white.

They thought he stayed alone with her, his dead Precious, in that room those days between her death and the burial. But I was there. I was there. I held his hand in the burning light, because Precious was afraid of the dark.

In that room we were a family. Grief will form one family just the way it will destroy another. It's a primary force. What did he lose when he lost her? What do I know 'bout what runs between a daddy and his daughter? Not very much. R. didn't know why Precious cried in the dark, and I don't know either.

Georgia is dirty laundry what needs washing.

I told that to R. last evening. We were out walking in Oakland Cemetery. Oakland Cemetery may well be the prettiest garden in Atlanta. And the dead don't care who's out walking with who and if their colors match. Plenty folks, black and white, pack picnics and make a feast of a visit. All those gravestones got us to talking 'bout whether I should or should not run home to Mammy.