The Wind Done Gone (3 page)

I have my reasons for not going and I have his. His reason is Other. Chivalry dictates that his wife and his mistress do not meet. I said, "Georgia is laundry what needs washing." He put one of his manicured hands over each of my ears and pressed. "Peanut head," he said. I couldn't tell if it was a joke or an insult, he was pressing so hard. I didn't like the fact he wouldn't acknowledge my truth.

Georgia is dirty laundry what needs washing.

If I didn't want to back down, I knew I had to turn my taunt into a joke. "I've got a big head. A watermelon head, more likely. Too big for ladies' hats. At least a walnut. You can crack open a peanut, so easy," I said. "You can do it with your fingers."

"You're too smart for your own good."

I smiled; he dropped his hands to his side. "I sent you on that Grand Tour as a jest," he said.

I wasn't smiling anymore. "Charleston's dirty laundry too. All of South Carolina." No sooner than I said it, he slapped me. He had never hit me before. No man had.

"The only thing you can beat out of me is my love for you." Beauty taught us to say that, and say it quick. It was the first sentence she taught every girl in her house. It stopped a lot of fights; it stopped her from having to shoot a man or two. It was an easy sentence to remember and a hard sentence to forget, especially with a palm print on your face. Anyway, it wasn't me he wanted to slap. But he couldn't slap Other. "I ain't taking her licks," I said.

I walked away from him. The red imprint of his hand was raised across my cheek. I traced the outline of it with the tip of my finger. Mammy had slapped me too many times to count. I knew well this vanishing brand. Invisible but searing.

Strange how you bring things to you. I think of the white house and Mammy, and I get slapped. Just what I was afraid of happened before I could even go home. How strange that just when I might go, Other had got there first. Run back to the house because R. left her. I had asked him to tell me what he said, what she said, how it looked, a dozen times. He didn't tell me anything. He only told me it was over.

But the walls have ears, and her maid told my maid, and my maid told me, that Other had run back from Mealy Mouth's deathbed to find R. already packed. That she had declared her love and pleaded with him. That he had cursed her but called her
my darling
or
dear,
but he told her he didn't give a tinker's damn what happened to her. When he walked out, she sat down on the stairs and cried. Then she ran home to my mother. That was just a month ago.

I will go to see Beauty today. I met R. under her whorehouse roof. Simple as that. I was fourteen years old. It was just before the war. Beauty needed a maid to pick up after her girls, so she bought me in the slave market down on the water in Charleston. I had an answer when any blue-blooded gentleboy at Beauty's would ask, "How a fine piece of embroidery like you get beyond white columns and painted walls?" They didn't expect an answer, but I had one. A fancy sentence I had practiced to show I was somebody: "A strange series of deaths in rapid succession following an influenza epidemic left a trail of inheritances that led me to the flesh market with a stop of work with a family who couldn't afford to keep a second ladies' maid." My twenty-dollar sentence was usually good for a laugh and a nickel tip.

Truth was, everybody was too busy nursing the sick, mourning, and grieving to write Planter and tell him that his old friend was dead, that the friend's son had died before he could marry, that I was living with a family who needed money, and would he like to buy me back. I didn't know how to write then; I couldn't tell the news that might have saved me.

Beauty bought me to serve in her place as a girl-of-all-work, but there was so much dirty laundry, all I ever did is wash soiled sheets, bleach sheets, iron sheets. You paid for pussy at Beauty's or you didn't get any, and the planters that came to Beauty didn't need to pay for poontang they could steal back at home, so I was most usually the only
female
virgin in the house. Males of that persuasion were frequent visitors. Mainly the planters liked their meat what we liked to call pink—before a girl began to bleed. They had less brats around the place that way. I think Beauty thought of buying me because she wanted to feel like more of a lady to R.

I'm going to stop writing and go right now.

Walking to Beauty's, my face still stung where R. slapped me. But his words had stung me more. My Grand Tour was rivers: the Thames, the Seine, what do they call all those canals in Venice? What name did that water go by? What destinations were in that book,
Murray's Infallible Handbook?
Rivers and the lake at Como. Atlanta is a landlocked place, a rail terminus, really and only. If it becomes a great city, it will be one of the first not built on a river. I ain't seen a big body of water in a time, but I still have my memories. Something that I cherish so much cannot have been a joke.

I went in a party of some friends of R.'s, an unpaid but working companion. The kind that holds the chairs on deck, fetches games, takes the smallest slice of beef, eats in the cabin when there is no space at table, ate at table when I wasn't hungry when someone needed a companion. I saw paintings. In Rome I met a colored woman from the United States who lived there as a sculptor of marble. She carved marble fauns. She and those rivers were a revelation to me.

Today, I came up the back way and in the kitchen door. Beauty's unpowdered nose was inside a great big cup of coffee. I've seen folk go down to the river to get baptized and I've seen them get sprinkled. None ever seemed so washed as Beauty after her coffee. Each and every morning that old whore jumped fully into that big black cup of coffee, and when she stepped away from her morning meal, she was fully cleansed of the sins of the night.

She didn't wait for Sunday for communion and she didn't wait for the river to be baptized; she had baptism and communion right there in her kitchen every morning. When any of the girls woke themselves up to share breakfast with Beauty, they got communion too. Morning with Beauty was its own religion.

Beauty isn't young. Her face was painted white, and the hair on the top of her head was the same shade of burgundy as the velvet of her front room chairs. Shaped like an hourglass but built like a brick house, she counted the change right the first time. She had a son didn't live with her. She sent him away to school. I don't believe in that. Over the years I've tried to talk Beauty into bringing the boy back with her to live. But she wouldn't hear me. Anyhow, he's a man now.

I sat myself down in the chair beside her. There was an empty cup in front of me like she was expecting somebody. She poured coffee into it. I asked her what I should do 'bout going home. Beauty just grunted, but she was serving me, and that said something. I pulled in closer to the table. The cup tingled in my hands. Beauty took another sip of coffee. "One way of seeing it, when you got a bitch for a mother she should expect to die alone. Other is, blood is blood." It was my turn to grunt. I looked into her eyes and knew that she expected to die alone. And I knew that for all her hospitality to me, her absence from He, him, her son, maybe had earned that. This whore had no "heart of gold," but then again she didn't pretend to. She was no better than she should be, but she was as good as need be. And my need be great.

The hand that had itched to slap her was brushed by her hand serving me. I tried to remember Mama pouring me a cup of coffee. Nothing came. She asked me if I was afraid of going. I said yes. She shook her head. I'd never seen her pity me. Not when she bought me off the auction block, not when she had me serving for her. She said, "Sometimes the only way to stop being afraid of a thing is to let it happen."

Blood is blood. I tried to imagine Other's hand pouring coffee for me. I winced and hoped R.'s bastard was growing in my belly. Beauty reached out and lifted up my face with the knuckles of her bent fingers. "If he had the reason, he might marry you."

"I don't want to give him a reason," I lied.

Lying brings a nervous tickle to my throat. My throat started tickling, and I laughed. Dark brown liquid shot from my mouth onto Beauty. I gasped and coughed again. She pushed me away from the table and all her fine linens. "You gone straight crazy, took the Black Diamond Express. Makes no stops and arrives in hell early." I was trying to stop laughing. I was trying to remember Mammy serving me something, pouring one cup of coffee, but all I could remember was Mammy pouring coffee for Other, her fine white hands trembling as Mammy filled her cup. And Lady holding out the cool glass of fresh milk to me. I don't know what face I made. But Beauty got to looking kinda scared. "Whatever you're thinking about don't think about."

"Then let me pour the next cup of coffee," I said.

R. makes "his rounds," as he names them, calling on the mayor, his bankers, hearing the chatter of the town, holding a cracked-kid-gloved finger up to the battering winds of cash, color, and politics each morning, returning to me at noon for his dinner. That's every day.

I have no appetite for presiding in my dining room. Most days I give everybody a holiday. His servants, my friends. There are no silent brown ghosts in this house—there's an eye for every hand and more ears than fingers 'round most houses. How the white people live surrounded by spies, I don't know. I can't do it. The slime of hatred on every sliver of soap, every sheet smoothed across every bed. "Our house has the supreme elegance of privacy," he says, referring to the small number of servants.

It unsettles R. that I chose to build my house in the middle of the colored—he would say "section," I will write "community." He would rather I had built on some outskirt, someplace that wasn't yet a neighborhood to be known as white or colored. But I like to be able to walk places, to church, to the dry goods, to Beauty's.

Most days I cook. It gives me something to do. But we have a cook, Portia Dred. She chose the name from the stories I told her, from the books in my library. The Act of March 2, 1867, debated over many a joint of Mrs. Dred's beef, created three categories of voters for the state and the primary categories of guests for my table: Negroes loyal to the Union who had never been in jail and had lived in the state a year, preferably those who are making money; Yankees poured down from the North finally resident a year, preferably those minting money; and loyal white Southern citizens who had been here forever but were willing to lie and spout the "ironclad oath," preferably those who have hidden money.

I have two books of recipes, and most all the time I cook from them. Almost always if we eat alone. But yesterday I made Mammy's chicken croquettes and fresh smashed peas from memory.

I'm still deciding when and if I will return to Cotton Farm. She, Other, is still in residence there. If I go, I will have to share both the place and Mama with her. I am hoping for a letter saying Mammy's turned the corner.

R. doesn't see my thoughts. They are made too small by his own. He loves Mammy, but not when he thinks of her as my Mama; he loves her through Other. He doesn't choose to remember I have a mother. I choose to forgive R. for what cannot be expected of him.

When we moved into this house, he carried me in his arms through the door and up the stairs into the most beautiful bedroom I had ever seen. When he was making the bed mine, between kisses he said, "Forget everything before now." Over and over he said it. He kissed me so hard. It was the only time he ever begged me. He was on his knees, I was laying on the bed, and he said, "Don't bring your past into this house." But it's breaking in like a robber in the night, and he won't wake up to save me from it, and I don't know if he got a gun anymore would do it. Every day it gets harder to see why he can bring his history into my house, but I can't bring my past. And every day I'm more afraid of my past than I was the day before.

***

I asked Cook to make the supper. I will try hard to give him what he has begged for, for his sake and my own.

We were served at eight. We began with shrimp étouffé and ended with little pots de crème au chocolat. I wore my Turkish trousers. After dinner, when we were still seated at the dining table, R. tells me what he didn't tell me at noon.

There's a man coming through Atlanta he wants me to meet. I tell him it's not the time, and he smiles in relief. He thinks I'm protecting him from those who would distract him from grief. But then he says we really must have the dinner and I am the one to give it. He flatters me by claiming the superiority of my table—"Never one flavor too many, never one flavor too few"—and I like it. I reward him with an invitation to take a rest with me on the green velvet couch.

He pulls me to him, out of my chair into his lap. Then he waits. I trace his lips with the tip of one of my fingers, then I push the finger into his mouth. When I try to pull it out, his lips tug hard. The tug is familiar. It steadies me. He's looking at me differently now. What the difference is, I don't know. But I see it. He looks at me hard. I raise my eyebrows. I know better than to speak. He says nothing. He just kisses me and looks at my hand as if it was something foreign.

There's a low wide couch in my bedroom upholstered in green velvet. He loves it when I'm sweet to him on it. I feel it calling to us now. When I was young I would invite him by saying, "The morning dew is on the southern lawn," and he would laugh at the proper way I invited him to impropriety. I was barely out of my childhood, just fifteen, when he asked, "Is the little bird twittering in its nest?"

"You make it sound so pretty."

"If you could see what I see." He kissed the lips he could kiss and still let me keep up mumbling proper-sounding improprieties: "The morning dew is on the southern lawn."

There are certain things we do only on that couch. He calls it visiting the honeysuckle garden. When I was old enough to walk, they put a fan in my hand to shoo the flies off Lady. I seen children play. Colored and white—colored far from the house, in the fields. Other, everywhere, under tables, in her room. I had no place to play then. My body became my place to play. I became my own playing ground.