We were sitting together at the kitchen table, me, Garlic, Mrs. Garlic, and Miss Priss. The rest of them had gone to sleep, won't wake till morning. Was Mrs. Garlic's kitchen now. Mammy's cap and Mammy's apron had been removed, and were already washed, folded, and put away; she had been sick a spell. Eating cornbread straight out of a skillet, drinking coffee from cracked cups. These events had never occurred in Mammy's kitchen. Chitlins on the stove were stinking up the place. If Mammy had ever wanted to eat chitlins, she would have cooked them out in the cabins. Freedom had a flavor, and we were tasting it. I breathe in the pungent aroma of change.
I had to ask. Everything was different, so maybe now was my chance. "Tell me about those little boys buried out there under the tree? Lady's boys.”
“What dey der da tell?" asked Mrs. Garlic, handing me a steaming bowl of pig entrails.
"You tell me," I said, hands still limp in my lap. My hunger for knowledge was sharper than my hunger for midnight food. I looked-forlornly, I hope-into Mrs. Garlic's eyes.
Miss Priss's arm shot out; she grabbed the first bowl for herself.
Between noisy chomps she declared, "You should a figured it out already." I am still hungry. I wanted to slap Miss Priss. Slap her hard. But I didn't do it. It always been this way with me. I'll call another girl "bitch" before you blink, but I don't like to hit a woman. I guess it always felt like too much of a man to do it. Strange enough. Strength always seemed to rob the girl out of me, so I always take care to keep it hid. I let my eyelids rest heavily upon my eyes and close.
Garlic's chomping down on his bowl of tripe. "Yah shouda' akse me.”
“Would you tell me?”
“I knows all about it." Garlic was playing with me like a cat batting at cobwebs, and I was dissolving and falling to the ground with each bat. I hate to be denied. I don't ask for things I can't have. I couldn't say more. But I was racing 'round the furniture in my mind, trying to find a chair to sit on. Why do I always think of it just that way? Is thinking truly like house cleaning? Finally I stumbled into an observation of Beauty's: "It's like a bad taste in your mouth to be the only person who knows something,. something good or something bad. Being the only one is bitter. Being one of two is sweet.”
“I'll keep your secret with you," I offered.
Garlic say nothing.
I rose as if to walk away. I said, "It's like starting to disappear at your beginning end. Ain't it?”
“What?”
“Forgetting. If I forget what happened to me in Charleston and you don't know it to remind me, it's gone. A year of my life gone like termites eating out the middle of a wood board, vanished into a mouth and flown away. Gone with the wind.”
“When ebrybody knowed what happened and why is dead.”
“You remember who I used to be. I got nobody in 'lanta to do that for me.”
“Now you admittin' that it you what needs me. I'm surrounded with memory." Garlic pulled me by the arm into his life, pushing me into a closer chair.
"We've spent enough time in this kitchen," said Mrs. Garlic. Wife and daughter got up and left us alone.
I've always been afraid of Garlic. He never treated me warm-like. I remember seeing him toss other children on the place-black and white-into the air to catch in his powerful arms. I remember seeing him sneak lumps of sugar to Jeems when he was about the place, but not to me.
Garlic poured a lot of milk in a cup, into which he stirred sugar, then a splash or two of coffee. Something in the way he slurped disturbed me. His lower lip poked so far out, it grabbed at the cup as if it were a third thumb. "How many time I sit in dis kitchen with huah when all de house sleep?”
“How many times?”
“You think you smart?”
“I hope I am.”
“Dat's da trufe. When we brought ya Mama to de house, it was huah and me late nights in dis kitchen. First you was coming, I hoped you were my baby. But then you came with what dey called peridot green eyes.
Pallas cried when she saw you wrapped in the little blanket. You were so clear white till your color came in. As little of it as you got." He laughed. I had never heard Garlic laugh before. It was a rolling, gut bucket cough of a laugh, like the clacking together of bones in a jar.
"What was it like when you first came here ? “
“I didin know nothin' but slavery times. I was born in this here country. All I could see to lifting me up was pulling real close to a powerful man and teasing him into thinking my thoughts was his own.
Your daddy was the man I found. Together we found Pallas. That was your mother's name. She had already found Lady. Now Pallas, she had it kinda easy, but it's easy what will corrupt you. Lady was cut from a strange cloth, and I guess it was Pallas what cut her." Pallas. My mother's name is Pallas. Not Mammy. Pallas.
As he told the story, Lady was fifteen years old, a heart-heavy virgin, when they came upon her. "A heart broke child, something just like her first girl is now." Other, he was talking about. "It was a stroke of good luck that boy bein' kilt.”
“Good luck?”
“Feleepe, dyin'. Lady loved her some Feleepe, and Mammy sho did love Lady. But Feleepe had money, and slaves of hid own, and he want to live right up dere in Savannah. If Lady a married him, Pallas a been a slave. When he got kilt, Pallas was sorry for Lady, but she saw her own good chance. If Lady married a man on a lonely place, a man with no people, Pallas could run the place, and she'd be free, free as she was going to be. And I knew me a man just like that." Mammy put the idea of the convent in one of Lady's ears and the idea of Planter in the other. Then she took her chance. Lady was leaning toward the convent. But her Daddy, he hated the Catholic Church more than he hated Catholics, and Planter was one. He couldn't bear to see his little gal given over to the Catholics. So she married Irish Planter, and if she didn't care, it was because Pallas kept feeding her something by the spoonful that didn't make your pain go away but made you stop caring that you hurt.
"I rode wid 'em up country. It was me and Mammy up front with Planter and Lady behind." On the honeymoon, Planter came to the room and found Lady knocked out, completely drunk, sleeping in Mammy's arms. "I was standin' right outside the door in case things didn't go right," Garlic told me. He said, "Mammy say to Marse, "Do yah bid ness and git out." He didn't see what happened, and the room was quiet. Later, Mammy told him. She washed Lady's body and carried her back to her bed after she, Mammy, change the sheets. Then Mammy went to Planter in his room and gave him what he wanted in his bed. She gave it so good, he never complained.
Mammy say Lady came to think of her baby as an immaculate conception like the priests in Savannah gabbled about. Between them, they called Lady "Virgin Mary." She like to pray, and she got her babies without ever knowing a man.
That's all I can write down now.
ye bottle I took from the sideboard is almost empty. If I stay here much longer, I'll need another one. I've got to write this down. But I don't want to.
"What did she say when she found out they sold me?”
“She didin know.”
“She didin know." Those three words mean more to me than "I love you." And they just as hard to believe. Garlic would lie for Mammy. Love.
Ignorance. Lying. How you supposed to know anything? God? Springs of faith? Weed patches of blindness with pretty little dandelions growing in them? I like to think, I would like to think, she didn't know. I see into this thing too deeply. Maybe she sent me away, for me. Once I was gone, she had to forget me, or she, Pallas, would a died of pain. I know all about it. Didn't I do the same? Forget or die of pain. Die of pain while I learned to forget?