Later, when I poured them coffee and they were enjoying their cigars, before their business began in earnest and I would retire, the Congressman asked R. if he was following the career of "my friend Francis L. Cardozo. You might be useful collaborators."
"The state treasurer?" responded R. "Exactly.”
“I know the name.”
“He was educated in Glasgow and in London. He was a minister in New Haven. Since the war he's been the principal of a school for blacks in Charleston. Next time you're in Charleston, you should see him." R. shrugged. His cigar had gone out. He lit it again.
"It would be interesting to meet with him in Washington. Or bring him to see us in Atlanta." R. changed the subject. If he was interested in the South's new colored leaders, he wasn't interested in them in his beloved old seaside town. He might eat with them in Atlanta or Washington, but he would never eat with them in Charleston.
I wonder what this means for me?
And I wondered if the Congressman had raised Cardozo's name at just that time, the moment I was pouring, to raise just that question in my mind.
We crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a ship called the Baltic. The crossing took seventeen days. My hate of seawater did not emerge until I was upon it for at least three or four. It popped up the way one of the sailors said that icebergs do.
Out of the fish-rich darkness emerges this white, killing thing.
Pointing straight up to the sky. A ship is like a cotton farm.
Everyone has his place. There are the officers and the sailors. From the officers' uniforms dangle brass buttons that sparkle like stars against the blue, the way soldiers' buttons do.
When I first saw R. in his soldier's uniform, I wondered who he had got it off, what dead boy or man. Whose skin did he inherit? Or is my skin the only skin that has been inherited in this-dare I say it-family?
It was during the burning of Atlanta; it was late in the war.
Or did he just buy that uniform in a store? I know you don't buy them in a store. Did he have it made up, in preparation? When did he know, when did he become a soldier in the South? A Confederate officer willing to die, to keep me-different from the sailors on the ship. The sailors who live in the hole and have more work and less water and no brass buttons, the difference between them and me-words on paper. I had the softer labor.
Words on paper, a bill of sale written out at the slave market in Charleston, a name and a price. The girls who sell themselves at Beauty's are saved the pain of words on paper; their prices disappear, spoken and forgotten in the air. The most free slaves are the ones who cannot read or write.
Later, I read about the Baltic. It carried supplies for the relief of Fort Sumter. I guess the Congressman had read about it too. Read and remembered.
Atlanta looks small this morning when I went go out walking.
Everything's so new. I smell the creosote in the train smoke and I remember wanting to go places, but I don't want anything now. Except to sit on the platform of the Atlanta train station and watch the folks coming and going, kissing and leaving.
Mama's dead, and I'm feeling old. I'm up next. It's my turn to die.
R. wants to move to Charleston. He wants to begin again. His daughter is dead. Every day all day so many events-but these two deaths are the center around which the rest of both our lives revolve. One was inevitable, the other a miracle. If Precious had lived, R. would never have thought of marrying me.
When his father was living, he felt the spit of paternal hypocrisy falling down on his city, on Charleston, like rain. He grew leery of the hypocrisy of the old place, the citizens who loved the oldness of their town but denounced with silence the vigorous sinners who had built it. They were an old family, and R. was descended from the best of the original line of bold sinners. He had not changed but he kept hoping the town would, that it would reach back beyond its proper present and allow him place. Somehow, with his father's death, R. seemed to think all his critics had vanished. All his longing glances were backward. Well, let him go to Charleston and see what he finds.
As sooner was R. out my door than I sent a message 'round to Jeems, asking him to come by the house to take some cakes back to Garlic. Then I ransacked my cookbooks for Excellency cake or Bonaparte cake or Presidential cake-something that would taste just like who I now knew Garlic to be, Garlic's position. Finding nothing equal to my new understanding of the man, I adapted a cake, exchanging bourbon and adding walnuts -a little bow to his hard outside and strength. I covered my confection with a golden brown maple-flavored icing and called it Empire cake. Cook was taking more golden layers out of the oven when the messenger returned, note in hand, having looked all over for Jeems. Figuring Jeems must a set off for home, he gave up.
I beat butter for the icing all afternoon long, it seemed. One of my tears slipped into the butter and I beat it in. The salt of the tear was a perfect foil to the sweetness of the butter. I smiled to think of how I had achieved perfection of the flavor.
When had R. grown old? When did he stop being Other's husband? How will I know? How will I let myself know? When did I start loving R.?
Had it stopped? Could it stop? Had I ever really loved him, or had I just wanted what was hers? Was he mine before he was hers? Was it me he saw when he first saw her walking down the steps of Twelve Slaves Strong as Trees? We had been lovers for over a year then. When did I first hear that he had met her? I remember all the pages I had covered with my name changed to end with his. All the fake letters I signed Mrs. R.B., never thinking one day my name might change. Now, with a tear of a blue velvet riding habit, muddied, bloodied, never to be cleaned, all is possible. Was no more wanted than this extraordinary cake drawing ants?
wonder if Jeems can read. I've decided to write him a letter. It's going to say: Dear Jeems, Thank you for riding me to town. It's nice to remember old friends.
I was wondering how to close the letter when Jeems knocked right on the front door. I must have looked surprised. "This here's yo' front do', ain't it? This ain't Cap'n B. house, is it?”
“It's my house." I had never before had colored company of my own in the front room; now Jeems sat on my sofa visiting me. For a moment I stopped to wonder what Jeems would think, seeing me surrounded by such wealth. Then I remembered myself. We had exchanged our earliest confidences in silk-wallpapered hall sand richly furnished corners. We had both dusted and mopped and washed too many fine things, too much Limoge, too much Wedgwood, too many times, to retain awe. The former field slaves will have different relations to wealth (the wealth they see and the wealth they attain) than we, who, like Jeems and me, worked in the house. Familiarity, even with things, breeds contempt.
"Our Congressman from Alabama came for dinner the other night.”
“Sure like to meet him. Wonder if he knows Smalls.”
“Smalls? “
“The colored Congressman who seized Planter in '62. Sailed the ship right over to the Union Army.”
“How do you know that?”
“I was in the Confederate Army. I was all tore up when it happened." For a fleeting moment Jeems let his face-o-woe mask distort his features. But it just didn't fit anymore.
It popped off; he was laughing. "Cried crocodile tears.”
“I'm sure you did. And now?”
“And now I'm on my way to Tennessee.”
“Tennessee? “
“I'm no farmer.”
“They have something more than farms in Tennessee ? “
“Horses.”
“Ain't that Virginia, or Kentucky?”
“Tennessee. I've got some family living on a plantation just outside of Nashville. Belle Meade. They breed fine horses there. They could use a man like me." Pieces of our world were just spinning off. Ever since Emancipation.