For what I done for you little Precious. Yo' chile dat died. Marry mah little gal. I am sincerely, Her Mammy Beneath the last two words Mammy had placed her mark, a cross in a circle.
cried enough to ride back to Africa on a slide of tears. "Mah little gal"-what I wouldn't give to hear her speak those words I see on the paper; what I would not give does not exist. I want to eat the paper.
I would give anything to hear her say "mah little gal." What am I writing? I would give everything to hear her say anything at all. I want Mama, I want my mother. I want Mammy. It's easy to want her, now that I know she wanted me. If I coulda wanted her when I didn't know she wanted me, she might be mine right now. She might be alive right now. Mammy never stood foot on London. Ah ain't goin' dere. I ain't goin' nowhere she ain't been. I'm staying here and looking for what's left of her.
gebt says all that's left of Mammy is me. He is polite enough to flinch as he says it. I ask him if he's imagining me fat and dark. He don't answer. He tells me about a dream Other used to have. A dream of hers. She was lost in a fog, running, looking for something, and she don't know what. Other never knew what she wanted, so she never had it even when she did. I ask him why he's still talking to me about her when she's buried in the ground. I say I know what I'm looking for. When I was a little girl I was looking for love. When they sold me off the place I was looking for safety. At Beauty's I was looking for propriety, and now, and now I have drunk from the pitcher of love, and the pitcher of safety, and the pitcher of propriety till I feel the water shaking in my ears. But thirst still burns. What I want now is what I always wanted and never knew-I want not to be exotic. I want to be the rule itself, not the exception that proves it. But I have no words to tell him that, and he has many feelings for me, but that is not one of them.
Later, I look at my reflection in the glass-and I try to see what he sees. I look for the colors. I see the blue veins in my breast. I see the dark honey shine of my skin, the plum color of my lips. I see the green of my eyes, and I see the full curve of my lips and the curl of my hair, and I _ know that it's not so very bad being a nigger-but you've got to be in the skin to know.
Am I still laughing? It is not in the pigment. of my skin that my Negressness lies. It is not the color of my skin. It is the color of my mind, and my mind is dark, dusky, like a beautiful night. And Other, my part-sister, had the dusky blood but not the mind, not the memory. There must be something you can do or not do. Maybe if the memories are not teased forth, they are lost; maybe if the dance is not danced, you forget the patterns. I cannot go to London and forget my color. I don't want to. Not anymore.
efhad never known him to be ignorant. But he is. He thinks like the others, the common tide. He thinks that the blackness is in the drop of blood, something of the body. I would have thought he knew enough women's bodies to know that that could not be true. And enough blacks and whites to know there is a difference. What did I suck in on Mammy's tit that made me black, and why did it not darken Other's berry? Was there some slight tinge, some darkening thing about Other?
Lady's fortitude; Other's willingness to take to the field? And how does one explain the sisters except that part of the blood memory must be provoked and inspired and repaired, time and again, to become the memory.
This tied-up-in-ribbons gift I want from him, he has no picture in his head of what that gift looks like unwrapped. No picture at all. The lift of a hat, the dip of his back-those gestures would remain as they have been, but the bitter curve of his lip holding back a laugh that salutes all that is strange and lacking in harmony in me, in him, in us, would vanish. That curve in his lips, that spark in his eye of-truth-yes truth, there is so much in me strange and discordant.
The notion of respecting me, as me, myself, would be, is, half foreign to his mind. No, no, not foreign; foreign is this coming week of travel, that idea is not foreign to him. Respect for me is foreign to me. Respect for me is an accomplishment of his, mine by gift, not mine by right. Absence and exoticism are such different keys of longing. He adores me, he has worshipped me, I believe he loves me, but never could the tone of his feeling be formed so that this cautious emotion, this sturdy food, "respect between equals," be what you called the way his heart turned toward mine.
It was always some warmer feeling, not the cold distance of temperance.
I want his respect. I have fragments of it and fractions. He admires my mind. I have read more books than any woman he knows well. The way I break rhythms, the way I make rhythms, he yearns for the music of my way of telling, of being, of seeing. But now our love songs are played in two keys: grief and remorse. I prefer grief to remorse. Without mutuality, without empathy to join and precede sympathy, I am but a doll come to life. A pretty nigger doll dressed up in finery, hair pressed for play. I will be the solace of sorrow but not the solace of shame. I have been dropped too deeply into the shame bucket to borrow any that belongs to somebody else. I wrap my shame in his respectability, I let his arms wrap 'round my shoulders, his weight press me into a sense of place. His self plunging into my heart awakens me, and, with it, a weak humiliation I've known so long, an aching bruise it pleasures to touch.
And yet and still I have wanted this for a long time. It was my first woman's dream. I have wanted this for too long to walk away without the prize I have coveted. I will marry him. I will marry him. I believe I will marry my Debt.
I read what I have written, and I wonder if I am not deranged. There is such a distance between the words and the events. And a greater distance between my feelings and the events. My feelings are closer to the words. I have never felt close to the events, because I have never controlled them. Someone else has written the play. I wish I could think it was God. I merely take my place on the stage. I wish whoever was writing the action would send the Congressman to call. "If I will not play the role in London, Debt sees no reason for us to quit the country. If I am to remain colored, I can remain colored just as easily here. According to him! I don't believe colored is easy anywhere. But I'm pleased to be spared the sea voyage. Again I remember stories from the quarters when I was young and stories from the docks in Charleston, stories of men and women and children chained into the bowels of ships. I hear them crying down the century. There is a song that came from the ships. I heard the story. The slaves sang some old tune and the ship was lost at sea. The owner was a slaver from way back and deep in his soul his conscience clean. But the ship got caught up in a storm where storms don't come, and he thought he saw the hand of God when the lightning cracked in the darkness. And he prayed to God to save him. And God spoke to him. God said, "I ain't saving you ifn' I don't save the ship. And I ain't saving the ship lessen I save the Daddys, and I ain't saving the Daddys without the Mammas and I don't need the Mammas less I save the babies.
You is less to me than spit. But if I save the babies, I'll save the Mammas." And God saved them all, and the man did not forget, Amazing grace! How sweet the sound of the slaves singing that saved a wretch like me. He once was lost but now he's found, was blind but now he sees. That happened to an Englishman; let it happen to me. Please Lord, let me see what it is that I want.
woke up this morning and some strands of my hair were on my pillow, the red butterfly was on my face, and my bones ached where they came together, like somebody was splitting kindling on me, and I am tired. I am shaking when Rosie comes for a fitting; she gives me the address of an old conjure woman born herself on African soil who lives just on the east side of the Capitol building. The conjure woman tells me to lie down in a dark room, and I do. I'm like one of those creatures from the swamp, one of those ghosts who only ride at night. I sleep in the day and come out in the darkness.