“You should have asked me.”
“If I had known how soon the opportunity would vanish, I might have done something different. I don't imagine you would prefer being my mistress to being his r sx wire.
Sleeping on the train is like riding a horse. Except you don't feel the wind; you see it. Things pass you by so quickly, until you realize that things are not passing you by; you are passing by the things, the trees, the ponds, the people. The people don't pass you by; you pass them by, carried along by power you don't see, carried along on a track you didn't create, and there is no way of getting back to any one pretty piece of property. You are moving too quickly. And you are old enough to know that anything you have time enough to get back to, has time enough to change before you can get back to it. You are sad.
I want to get up from this bunk and go to him. I have more imagination than he. I can close my eyes and want to be that which he cannot imagine me preferring to be. I can prefer to be different than I am now. The worm does not imagine becoming a butterfly, but I have seen the worm and the butterfly, so I don't have to imagine. Does the worm die and the butterfly is born where the worm was, or is it a continuous life, without stops? Or is it no life at all without thought, or memory, or an ability to cry out loud? Possessing only beauty, is the butterfly alive? I'm too tired to chase after my mind as it rambles.
More in the morning.
Morning came, and I came crisp and clear with it. We are pulling into Washington soon. I must put you down to stroll these kinks out of my legs.
etrayer! I leave you down and you tell him what I have whispered into your pages. I came back, and there he was, reading, intent on his reading.
I said, "Sir, you are no gentleman ! " He said, "You're right about that, Cynara." He knew my name and called me by it. "I'm a man." He teased me, and it was infuriating. "A strong man, a statesman, a colored man, but I am proud to say I am no gentleman." I spoke the verbal equivalent of a foot stamp. I pouted like the schoolgirl I had never been instead of the whorehouse maid I was. I couldn't stop myself from saying, in all petulance, "All the years I lived under his roof, he had respect for my privacy!" He could only just stop himself from laughing at me. "No, you got that just about right the first time. He had respect for privacy; it's a gentlemanly principle and you were the beneficiary. He didn't have respect for you-respect for Negro women is not a tenet of the code of the Southern gentleman, but it's a tenet of mine." A silence fell between us that I didn't get the measure of.
Time was freezing or expanding; it was doing something to get me and keep me lost. I can't tell you if it was the longest minute of my life or the shortest hour, but I was lost in it. When I found myself, I reached out for my book. He held you out toward me like bait. I reached for you, pulled you toward me, felt him holding on, then relinquishing. I seized you.
"Thank you," I said as formally as I could manage.
He was trying to look right into me. "Don't thank me until you know I read it all.”
“You didn't have time to read it all," I snapped back. I didn't know what he had read. But whatever he had read, he was looking at me with sharper interest. It is thrilling to be known even when the knowledge is stolen, stolen like rubies.
A price above rubies. A virtuous woman is worth a price above rubies. I was a maid untouched when I came to R." and she, Other, was not. She had had two husbands and two babies. I pride myself on being the only colored gal I know who's had only one man and no children. I suspect the stream of my passion is so powerful because I have shored it up so narrowly. No diversions, no creeks, no tributaries of any kind, have been allowed. This man before me could change all this.
I "merit a price above rubies." Were those R.’s words the night he bought me? What can those words mean to me now, today, to a woman pulling into the B & O depot accompanied by a Congressman? I was pleased that the train was pulling into the station. We had things to do other than the things I wanted to do, and I was pleased for that. He told me, in a tone that rude people reserve for servants, that we had many preparations to make before getting off the train. In a curt tone I never use, I suggested that he get on about it. Looking as if he wanted to slap me, he called for a servant and withdrew. Being careless with my packing, I stole time to write in you, traitor. We traveled to his sister's in the northwest quadrant of the city in a hired carriage and in silence. We had never been so alone before. I had never been so alone with any man aside from my Debt. It was exciting to be so close and to withhold-everything. I am the river, and I am the dam about to burst. I will win if my walls hold strong, I will win if my passion burst through; either way is victory. I have never been in this position before in my life; either way I turn, I win. Until now my virtue has been unreal-never tested. Now in this man I have a true desire and a true question; the pleasure is exquisite. Exquisite; this is the wash of freedom. It has nothing to do with politics or elections. It has to do with having many things you want and being free to choose between them or free not to choose and remaining safely the same.
A Negro woman who would not change her position. This is a novelty. We have not liked where we were, even when we didn't know what or how to change, when we simply dreamed of flying away, I'll fly away, I'll fly away, when I die. But I imagine flying away into his arms, dying to be reborn again, and dying again and again, waking after each little death into new pleasures. But it is not imagining; it is remembering from long ago with the faces changed. I am a maiden no longer. We arrived at his sister's house without speaking a word. But his eyes told me, his eyes told me, he saw me beautiful, and my whole self told him, I hear you, and I like so very much what I hear.
"he wasn't there. The whole family was out. He showed me to my room, and I took my hat from my head, pulling out the pin; then I loosed my hair from the tight ball that was making my head ache. I turned back toward the door; he was looking at me, a suitcase in each hand. His sister does not keep servants. I walked toward him but only in the sense that a piece of metal jumps toward a magnet. I was drawn. I was pulled. I took my suitcases with my own hands from his, turned my face toward his, opened my mouth wide. I waited for his lips. It was a wanton gesture. The first wanton gesture of my life. A gesture I had scorned when I had seen it in the whorehouse. He did not disappoint me. Lord, he did not disappoint me at all.
I have done what I would not have done had I contemplated it longer.
I'm terrified. Moving to being a woman of his, I have found myself in the neighborhood of Beauty's girls, the women with more than one man.
And then it is nothing at all like that or anything else I have known, this exquisite chaos.
This is what the psalmist was writing about in the Song of Songs. I recognize it at once. And I am afraid, not of his finding out, but of being this new person, a less than perfect person who has violated one of her most dearly held principles, and a person who has never felt such pleasure, a person I have never read about in books.
The pleasure of his body and the pleasure of his knowing me has carried me into some sacred territory I did not know existed. The mystery of making love to myself, for he is me, and I am he, and I know all that he and she want. In the church of this sex I am the preacher and the congregation. He is the preacher and I am the congregation. I am the preacher and he is the congregation. The call becomes the response and the response the call, and I am shouting and falling out. Eager to let the old Cinnamon die and let the new Cynara be born all the nights to come.
This is a sweet thing, sweeter than anything I have ever known. If there is anything better than being a free nigger on Saturday night, it's being a free Negro on Sunday morning; in his sister's bed I have my cake and eat it too.