The Wind Done Gone Part 1

The Wind Done Gone.

By: Alice Randall.

This novel is the author's critique of and reaction to the world described in Margaret Mitch.e.l.l's Gone With the Wind It is not authorized by the Stephens Mitch.e.l.l Trusts, and no sponsorship or endors.e.m.e.nt by the Mitch.e.l.l Trusts is implied.

This doc.u.ment was discovered in the early 1990S. It was among the effects of an elderly colored lady who had been in an a.s.sisted-living center just outside Atlanta.

The resident's name was Prissy Cynara Brown.

Specifically, two doc.u.ments were found: a leather-bound diary, written in an ornate and hard-to-decipher hand with a pen and pencil, and a typescript of the diary prepared sometime later.

According to notations in her medical records, Ms. Brown was hospitalized in July of 1936 for a period of three months after suffering a severe emotional collapse. She was hospitalized again for a month in 1940, beginning on New Year's Day. Other than these two episodes (which coincide with the publication and movie premiere of Margaret Mitch.e.l.l's Gone With the Wintl), it appears from letters and clippings that Ms. Brown had enjoyed a life of excellent health and service to the community, frustrated only by her inability to get the diary published.

Pressed into the diary was a photo-postcard of the Washington Monument under construction, a fragment of green silk, and a poem by Ernest Dowson, "Non sum qua lis cram bonae sub regno Cynarae."

NON SUM QUA LIS ERAM BONAE sue REGNO CYNARAE Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine; And I was desolate and sick of an old pa.s.sion, Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat, Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay; Sure the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; But I was desolate and sick of an old pa.s.sion, When I awoke and found the dawn was gray: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; But I was desolate and sick of an old pa.s.sion, Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine; And I am desolate and sick of an old pa.s.sion, Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Ernest Dowson, 1867--1900 "I am not as I was under the reign of the good Cynaraa"from Horace's Odes Say is the anniversary of my birth. I have twenty eight years.

This diary and the pen I am writing with are the best gifts I gota"except maybe my cake. R. gave me the diary, the pen, and the white frosted tiers. He also gave me emerald ear bobs I think maybe my emeralds are just green gla.s.s; I hope maybe they be genuine peri dots I was born May 25, 1845, at half-past seven in the morning into slavery on a cotton farm a day's ride from Atlanta. My father, Planter, was the master of the place; my mother was the Mammy. My half-sister, Other, was the belle of five counties. She was not beautiful, but men seldom recognized this, caught up in the cloud of commotion and scent in which she moved. R. certainly didn't; he married her. But then again, he just left her. Maybe that means something to me. Maybe he's just the un seldom one who do recognize. If I strip the flesh off my bones, like they stripped the clothes off my flesh in the slave market down near the battery in Charleston, this would be my skeleton: childhood on a cotton farm; a time of shawl-fetch slavery away in Charleston; a bare-breasted hour on an auction block; drudge slavery as a maid in Beauty's Atlanta brothel, when Milledgeville was the capital of Georgia and Atlanta was nothing; a season of candle-flame concubinage in the attic of that house; a watery Grand Tour of Europe; and, finally, concubinage in my own white clapboard home, with green shutters and gaslights, in the center (near the train depot) of a fast-growing city that has become the capital of Georgia, concubinage that persists till now. How many miles have I traveled to come back to here?

They called me Cinnamon because I was skinny as a stick and brown. But my name is Cynara. Now when I tell it, I say they called me Cinnamon because I was sweet and spicy. Sweet, hot, strong, and blacka"like a good cup of coffee. Leastways, that's how Planter liked his coffee.

Planter used to say I was his cinnamon and Mammy was his coffee.

He said those words a day I had gotten into trouble dashing before Other upon the stained-gla.s.s colored light that fell in rows of blue and pink diamonds down the wide hall of the big house. If I was ten years old, it must have been I 855. I b.u.mped into the leg of the Hewitt sideboard. Other was ten years old too. It was one of those days we had back when everything seemed it would always be just as it has always been. Everything and everyone had a place and rested deep in it, or so it seemed that day to would-be knights and ten-year-olds. Then I b.u.mped into that carved leg, and the sh.e.l.l-shaped bonbon dish jumped off Lady's sideboard as if it just wanted to split into a hundred porcelain shards on the lemon oiled pine floor. Something had changed, and I had changed it. Someone wanted to beat me. Mammy said she'd beat me good, with a belt. Other lied and said she'd knocked into the table. Said it *cause she knew it would pain Mammy to give me a whipping.

And sometimes Planter said it when he heard me making up little rhymes to sing to myself. Sometimes when Mammy was putting Other to sleep on a day pallet for a nap, he would call for me to sit at his feet on the broad porch and sing my little songs to him. "Cindy, come sing, come sing! Ain't you my Cinnamon and she my coffee?" he'd ask. And I'd be slow to go, because I knew someone might be missing me.

On the day Planter told me I was leaving the place, I asked him what he had meant when he said that I was his cinnamon and she was his coffee. He said to me, "I mean a man can do without his cinnamon but he can't do without his coffee." I poked my lip out. "I mean you're a gracious plenty."

"I belong here?"

"Gracious plenty foreign to me child."

R. says Planter was an Irishman and all Irish are shiftless, lazy crackers, no matter how rich they get. He always wants me to look outside the neighborhood for models of my deportment. He often mentions that Georgia was once a penal colony. The first time he said it, I didn't know what a "penal colony" was. He says only the English and the French know anything about gracious plenty. He says when Planter and Mammy got together, they cooked a broth too rich for potato-water blood.

It was Planter who sent me away, but he got the go ahead from Mama. It was the year his third son died, and he said it would be a good turn for me. I was thirteen the day they rode me off. It was 1858.

Mammy was my Mama. Even though she let me go, I miss her. I miss her every time I look into a mirror and see her eyes. Sometimes I comb through my long springy curl sand pretend that the hand holding the comb is hers.

But I don't know what that looks like. Then I wish I was Other, the girl whose sausage curls I've seen Mammy comb and comb. I wish for the tight kinks of the comber or the glossy sausages of the combed. I wish not to be out of the picture.

Mammy always called me Chile. She never called me soft or to her softness. She called me to do things, usually for Other, who she called Lamb. It was "Get dressed, Chile!" and "What's mah Lamb gwanna wear?"

have tried to forget the place I was sent from, Cotton Farm, and the house in which I was born, Tata. If Sherman had burned it down to the ground, I believe I would not have labored in vain. I believe I would have succeeded. I believe I might have attained my own personal succession. But he didn't. And I keep thinking that G.o.d saved it for some purpose, but it wasn't G.o.d who saved Cotton Farm; it was Garlic, when he flapped like a fool and begged the Union troops to carry him away from all the fever and dying in the house. Every time he'd approach a Union horse and rider, they'd buck back farther away. n.o.body wanted to get close enough to any of the buildings to rescue a slave or make a "building barbecue"

possible. So, after all that I have forgotten, I still remember the place. The place, and the people who sent me away.

Sy called her Mammy. Always. Some ways I like that. Some days when it was kind of like wea"she and mea"had a secret against them, the planting people, I like it. Different days, when it feels she wasn't big enough to have a name, I hate it. I heard tell down the years they compared her to an elephant. They shouted down to their ancestors: She was big as an elephant with tiny dark round eyes. But she wasn't big enough to own a name. To me she was big as a house. Big as two houses. I'd be scared to be that.

Scared to be bigger than a minute and a snap of dark fingers. "She's no bigger than a minute," Mammy would say, snapping her thick, strong-as-branches fingers, stealing words from him whose watch Garlic inherited. Him who was my Daddy and never gave her or me nothing like time, Planter.

Anyways, Mammy's eyes are big, just like mine. Garlic used to tell me that all the time. Garlic was Planter's valet, and he liked women with great big legs. If I ever started to get big, R. would let me go.

Even Other called Mammy out of her name. Other, who loved my mother; Other, who ran to her Mammy like I never seen n.o.body run to anybody, or anything, for the more significant matter, ran to Mammy like she was couch and pillow, blanket and mattress, prayer and G.o.d. Other rested her head on Mammy's brown pillow b.r.e.a.s.t.s, snuggled in beneath a blanket of fat brown arm, breathe in the prayer of Mammy's breath and out the G.o.d 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, n.o.body'll remember me except maybe somebody who find this book. I read Uncle Tom's 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 n.o.body 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 Dougla.s.s.

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 side yard 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 home folks 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 p.r.o.nounced "alchemy of slavery," and a shining coffeepot, candlesticks, and saltcellars changed before my dreaming eyes into little piles of cotton b.a.l.l.s 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, pa.s.sing 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 gla.s.s of the windows. But I am inside looking out, toward the distant cabins.

Through the pink gla.s.s 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.

of I go back there, I'm going to get my Daddy's watch and have it engraved to read, TO R . B . FRO M 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 t.i.tty-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; *3she 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 p.r.o.nouncing, "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 Mammy 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 gla.s.s 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 coQI water and a gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s of milk. I hesitated. "You can drink it." I took the gla.s.s and drank. She took the gla.s.s 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 unb.u.t.ton 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 childbirtha"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 d.a.m.n 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, 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.

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 19white 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 d.a.m.n 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.

will go to see Beauty today. I met R. under her wh.o.r.ehouse 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 gentle boy 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 p.u.s.s.y at Beauty's or you didn't get any, and the planters that came to Beauty didn't need to pay for poon tang 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 pinka"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 ca.n.a.ls in Venice? What name did that water go by? What destinations were in that book, Murrays Infallible Handboot? 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 s.p.a.ce 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 un powdered 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 wh.o.r.e 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 hourgla.s.s 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 23 . 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 wh.o.r.e 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 h.e.l.l 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 gla.s.s 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. 25 . I have no appet.i.te 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 smoothe 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 coloreda"he would say "section," I will write "community." He would rather I had built on some out skirt 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.