Lady told me that. When I traced her neat script with my finger, she quickly tripped along, "Your mother worried me from the moment you came, to get that inscribed in the Bible." Mammy wanted the day and the exact time. "I told her," Lady said, "I thought the day would do, but Mammy wanted the time, and we don't own the exact time anywhere here on this plantation." I am twenty-nine years old. He is forty-six. I have no words to tell him that I am not traveling with him to London. I have lived under his roof almost half my life, and the only other people who have provided me a roof are dead. I will go to London with him.
Tonight when he lies beside me I will reach for him before he reaches for me. I have half my life before me, and I cannot afford for him to grow bored.
Strip to London has been postponed, indefinitely. We are leaving for Nashville! I will see Jeems. R. has some connections in that city. A maiden aunt with a bit of fortune and an awkward assemblage of hangers-on, threatening to bleed her whiter than she already is. Folk in Charleston think he should have gone as soon as possible, and the letter was delayed in the post, so he needs to leave already. He wants to travel light-without me, and this is a thing I would have accepted.
It is our usual way for me to stay at home, stay in our little enclosed world, but coming to Washington has changed that, and I have no taste for staying put. He tells me that people will know I'm his mistress-if I go.
I tell him, "Everybody I know knows I'm your mistress. It's only some of your friends who don't know. And can that matter to you now? Now, you think on marryin' me?”
“Precisely, my dear," he says. "I can't take you as mistress where I may one day want to take you as wife." I shake my head and insist. I would like to stamp my feet. I have no taste for being separated from him now. "Don't you have friends in the city with whom I can stay ? " He doesn't seem to be giving it a thought. So I say, quietly, "Some of the old folk from Cotton Farm live in Nashville. Write to the family at Belle Meade. Ask them to let me stay in one of the old cabins. All things can be arranged between gentlemen.”
“I am surprised you'd be willing to stay back in the cabins.”
“Why? Lincoln freed the slaves. What do I have to worry about?”
“It's been a long time since you were in the cabins." I let him pull me into his arms. "I'd do more than that r >s ror you.
He kisses my head and agrees to write the letter. "I feared you were succumbing to the charms of Washington," he says.
Hope of visiting Jeems makes me nostalgic for spacious, high-ceilinged rooms and lavish plaster embellishments. The outer doors, the front doors of Tata were six feet wide. When they were open, it was as if the side of the house had been taken down. We will take back this place, we will take back this place, a tree once grew where this dining room stands and will grow there again; we will take back this place, nature says as you move through the house; and it was Garlic who created the structure that said it.
Later, I take a nap and dream of Jeems.
Carriage ride to Belle Meade is not to be. Me be, we be, I am, we are sailing to London. We are sailing to London. I am and he is, the sail and the wind, and the old city. We are a whisper of wind seeking for London, a clean rag from the wash on a straight-up pole, pushing on to London. We are these new people who sail for pleasure. But the wind and the whisper and the rag are part of what I know, and the me in the other we, I am, fears. We are a sailed people. We sailed to America.
We taste the path of our abduction in our tears. It's as if the house is on fire and I've got to get out quick.
Hate or fear of "crossing the water" may be the only thing I have left of my mother's, my grandmother's. Surely, it's the only thing that I have that I know I have. Maybe I have something else and I don't know it. If the fear were truly mine, I could touch it more intimately, get into its crevices, or let it get into mine, and I would know it. This feeling hangs down low in me, a heavy lump of an unexplored thing, like a clod of brown-red mud giving off some old mother heat.
The old aunt died before we could pack for Nashville. I long for forest. I yearn for the trees and the horses of Jeems, the steam from their nostril sand the steam from their fresh dung. I miss the safe inland cities. Nashville, Atlanta. These cities with their front porches on the ocean, Washington, Savannah, Charleston, scare me, like a door left open on a dark night with robbers about.
But I am hungry for the city on the Thames. I think of the palaces, Hampton Court where Queen Elizabeth lived, I think of the Tower of London and all the things I read about in those Walter Scott novel sand those slow Jane Austen pages. The only one of those I ever loved at all was Mangeld Part. Fanny hated slavers. I think of all those ladies now because-why? Because-why? Because, having forgotten what I saw there, they are all I know of the world to which I am going.
Dusty pages. Mouse supper.
I laughed so hard at breakfast, my insides got tickled. I laughed so good, I was the giggle and I was drunk on it too. I laughed so hard this morning my stomach hurt from stretching and shaking. The deep belly laugh cures more than you know that ails you. I had forgotten that. It's been so long since I had one. The rumble and the jiggle of the thing does a woman more good than a poke. But the good strong belly laugh is harder to come by than a good stiff poke.
Debt Chauffeur, that's my name for him now, wants to marry me. He asked me down on bended knee, and I would have been honored-except he wants us to live in London, and he wants me to live white. I crowed at that. I laughed so hard, and not a tear came. He couldn't understand it. I don't often think on how white I look; it's always been a question of how colored I feel, and I feel plenty colored. He said that no one in London will know that I'm supposed to be colored. And I said I am colored, colored black, the way I talk, the way I cook, the way I do most everything, and he said but you don't have to be. She was "black" and she didn't seem it, and she was not that much lighter than you, and she was "black." At last that explained everything to him. I understood it near at once. It had never seemed before that he so little knew me. Always at least he knew the difference between her and me, and now he saw little difference, and the advantage was all to Other.
I tell him. Mammy is my mother. I think of her more as the days pass.
I can't pass away from her. He says she's the one asked me to do it. I don't believe him, and he hands me another letter. script was ornate but the words were crude. I didn't recognize the handwriting. Before I read the contents I guessed the fine script belonged to some Confederate widow, a general's wife or daughter, who owed a favor to Lady and repaid it to Mammy. But what I read Mammy would never have dictated to any friend of Lady's. I suspect she came to Atlanta, came to Atlanta and didn't visit me, came to Atlanta and got someone from the Freed Men's Bureau to do her writing. I can hear her saying, "Git it 'xact. I ain't here fo' no about." Syllable and sound, the words were Mammy's.
Dear Sur, You done already send one of mah chilrens back to me broke. Lak an itty bitty thang, a red robin, you done twist her soul lak da little neck and huah can't sang no mo'. She was mah Lamb, so I guess that how that goes.
Now you got mah chile. What was my vary own. Dat's a love child you got, Cinnamon. Skinny as stick, spicy and sweet. An eyes-wide-open-in-the-daylight child. She need a rang on her finger and some easy days, dat gal do. I had me the roof and the clothes, I watch huah Lady wear de jewels but Ah ain't ne'er cared nothing about dat. Ah done toted and tarried and twisted mah own few necks, but dis ain't about dat. Let mah child love you. And let Gawd love her too.