It's an old confusion, people turning into things. When folks is gone (sold, dead, run-off), you got a corn husk doll, a walnut-sh.e.l.l ring, fingertips of dirt on the hem of a dress. It happened so much, maybe now things turn into people. The house, Tataa"Garlic could hear it speak. All it contained of the brown lives it had eaten; it was a living thing. Garlic walks into the great hall of the house like R. pushes in between my thighs; his eyes scream, "Sugar walls, sugar walls." Everything sweats in the heat. Garlic won't permit anything that might provoke Other to sell the place. Won't put Cotton Farm at risk at all. It's hissa cred place.

I come to see what I ain't seen before. Me on the place might taint it. Soon she'll come back to *lanta, and I'll see what Garlic say then. is involved in some kind of foreign currency exchange scheme. He came to know a good many foreign bankers during the war, when he was selling cotton on the foreign markets.

At home the pendulum seems to swing again, swinging away from the promise of real change: the change from little boys and little girls picking cotton to children reading and writing and wearing shoes and eating every day and one day getting to vote or getting to influence their father's or their brother's vote. It's like being pregnant. You are or you are not. A child has those things or does not. Conservative victories ended Congressional Reconstruction in Virginia before the state was admitted back into the Uniona"was it just last year? Was it 1870?

Reading or not, voting or not, these changes are small but necessary. They are the salt on the meat of our existence, eating or not, sheltered or not, living or not. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippia"we're holding on to our votes there, even R."s beloved South Carolina. When 1880 comes, I fear and he hopes, it will not look so very different for so very many from 1860.

But it will look different for me.

I want him to take me on a boat to a.s.sisi or Florence, some place like that, some place I ain't seen, some place we could see together. Dublin, maybe. Dublin's good. I used to hear Planter talk about there. Or Egypt. I like it when he tells me Egyptian stories and calls me Cleopatra, except the snake bit her. Some folks say my house is a cross between Egyptian Revival and Charleston architecture. Some folks say my columns look like bundles of broomsticks. R. says they look just like bundles of papyrus reeds. I know I own three of Mr. Shakespeare's plays, Romeo and Juliet, Cleopatra, and Oth.e.l.lo. Nurse reminded me of Mama. She didn't know who Juliet was and couldn't do nothing to protect her, really.

I asked him this morning at breakfast; he says I must wait.

I'm tired of reading and writing and cooking two meals when I don't have Cook in. I have a little business. From the money R. gives me, sometimes I make little loans to the freemen. They pay me back. I made a loan today. Other has a business. Beauty has a business. Other got men working for her; Beauty's got gals. Me, I got R., but R."s done working. Now, he invests and sometimes it looks like he's chasing respectability the way he used to chase money, and sometimes it looks like he's chasing power.

Some of the freemen I loan money to come from Cotton Farm. Everybody say Other feeling Mammy's death hard. She doing poorly. Her beauty just about drained from her. I think that's the reason she doesn't come back to town. I look in the mirror and wonder if the same thing has happened to me and I stay blind to it. It is one of the good things about being coloreda"we don't show our age until all at once, all of a sudden, we need to. Then we get fat and old quick, quick enough to keep away those we need to keep away. I've heard R. talk about it. The orthodox ladies shave their heads and the yellow n.i.g.g.e.r girls get fat. Either way, only their own man wants them.

R. loves the old ways of Savannah and Charleston and Njawlins; only these cities are old enough for him now. I used to be his exotic adventure, and now it is I who is old and familiar. Other is just a reminder of the dearly departed. He takes me in his arms like a child now, and I know he can see his little girl's smile on my face. Planter's smile. I wonder if that is why he turns away from me.

iP R. brought me a ring back from Charleston. As if we could marry before they divorce. As if everyone will forget he was a war profiteer before he was a blockade buster; as if I can forget he was a Confederate soldier.

The ring sits on my finger gold and green. And I can't help liking it, because it looks like something Other would have liked. If I die and he gave the ring to her, she would wear this emerald never even knowing it had been on my finger. Some things are so pretty, you wear them even when you know where they've been. Most times, most folks, you just don't know.

89 I say the ring is perfect. The stone is perfect. R. says when you looking to see if you got a real jewel, you look for the flaws. I don't know what he's talking about. Sometimes he just talks.

I wonder where we would be married. In my little gray African Methodist Episcopal church, Bethel, or in his big white plain Episcopal one?

L. P. Grant gave the land for the "African church" before I was born. After the war he claimed he "never gave the lot for free negroes to worship on, but for slaves." He wanted his land back. In the end, Bethel got Grant's land and Grant's anger. He loved the little black congregation enough to give it the land, but he hated when it a.s.serted its independence from the white Southern Methodist Church. But then again, it was prominent white citizens who pressed Grant to let Bethel keep his land.

I wonder what preacher we could ask. "I will not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments," R. said. He said and I couldn't help thinking, "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sung." Where is that from? All these bits and pieces of'edjumacation" I have sewn together in my mind to make me a crazy quilt. I wrap it *round me and I am not cold, but I'm shamed into shivering by the awkward ways of my own construction. All the different ways of talking English I throw together like a salad and dine greedily in my mongrel tongue.

Still, I wear the ring, and my hand sparkles when I wiggle my fingers. I lift my hand and wiggle my fingers. I follow my fingers with my eyes. I look at my pretty fingers and feel like a baby in a basket wiggling her toes, giggling to see them. I wiggle my fingers and watch. I am the actress and the audience. I am complete in my admiration of my performance. I applaud myself privately with these fingers in my bird's nest.

Sometimes you got to celebrate yourself.

Once it was only his hand that pleasured me. Those were sweet years, a time I sought to lose myself in him. It took a white-hot grown-man flame to distract me from little-girl pain. He did that for me. And I remember it.

I looked into his face tonight and it promised the face that was not there. It came to the front of my mind what I was looking for. The front of my head feels like a house, and the thoughts reside within different set places that I can rearrange like furniture, but mostly I don't. I come from a furniture-dodging tribe. We tiptoe around the pieces as they remain in place. I'm thinking that way again. Strange, the small things that make us proud.

We are going to Washington. The one old city I had forgotten. R. says he's taking me to walk through the halls of power, but I get gooseflesh like there's someone walking on my grave. I don't know much about Washington, but it kind of feels like walking into the belly of a beast. When I sleep tonight I hope I dream of Jonah and he looks like me.

f Atlanta is a city of wood, Washington is a city of brick. And it's not all so very old.

R."s rented a house on 34th Street. It isn't far from the ca.n.a.l. The road is cobblestone and the sidewalks are red brick and the houses are real close together. They say the city is built on a swamp and you can't stay here in the summertime.

There are rich black families here.

They say the dusky Syphaxes are related to General Washington. There's a world of colored people here who were free before the war.

Other is writing him, imploring him to come back.

His maid slips her letters to my maid, who slips the letters to me.

Jsaw the President's house. It looks like a wedding cake. I wonder if I'll ever go in. I wish I could ask R. directly. We went to see a play at the Ford's Theater. A woman's dress caught fire. Some of these new dyes are so dangerous. We are staying in the Willard Hotel while the inside of our house is painted. Julia Ward Howe wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" when she stayed here. She heard Union troops outside her window singing "John Brown's Body" and decided they needed something more serious. Me, I favor "John Brown's Body." What could be more serious than "moldering in the grave"? This morning we went to a little church across Lafayette Square from the President's house, St. Johns. It's painted bright yellow and has a dome.

Would R. take me, could we go, to the White House? He never tells me the rules, and I don't ask. I just see. Do they let Negroes in the front door? I wonder about the servants in the house. I hope they colored. The worst white folks in the world are the ones don't know any black folks at alla"those up North with Irish maids.

,

We played cards, whist, all afternoon, and all the cards seemed to fall my way. I feel lucky. Living in a hotel is like living in a tree, you are so far off the ground. I wonder how high up you have to be to get close to G.o.d. I wonder if anyone will ever design a place you can live as tall as the Washington Monument or, better still, as tall as the Washington Monument is going to be. If we are not living in the vicinity of G.o.d, I'm starting to think we are in the vicinity of low-flying angels.

There is a man staying in the hotel who is part of a delegation from j.a.pan. He wants to know all about our home, the place where R. and I come from. In his lovely unlidded eyes, we are from the same place: "a plantation" in "the South." We are more alike each other than either of us is like him, more alike each other than either of us is like the people he knows from Boston. At least that's how it looks to him.

And this afternoon, with the cards falling my way, holding all four queens: the diamond, the heart, the spade, and the club; hearing R. laugh with pleasure at my triumph as I placed my cards so they made a loud little sound smacking the table; as he laughed and announced, "And possessing a king too, you need no aces"; as we ate lunch sent up from the hotel restaurant, and I tasted just how different the world was than I thought it would be, how much larger it is than I thought it wasa"everything, everyone, and every place that wasn't in our suite seemed unreal. We played another hand of cards, and I let R. win.

news from homea"Other's gone. Other's gone. And now R."s gone too, gone to bury his wife. Bad things come in threes. First the baby, then Mammy, and now Other. I thought he'd cry, but he didn't.

Now we won't have to wait for a divorce. Or maybe not. He's leaving here, he's leaving me.

There's the funeral and her first two children, the boy and the girl.

At the door when he left he said that the children were his by law and conscience. He told me the children would keep living in her house in Atlanta. He'd be moving an English nanny in with them. Later he would send them to boarding school.

Gone. Fell down the steps. First came smallpox. They say she looked in the mirror, then fell down the steps. They say she'd been drinking.

R. got a wire; that's how we knew.

vwas invited to the home of Mr. Frederick Dougla.s.s today. I'm not sure if I should go. R."s not back yet. It's been a while. I've heard almost nothing from him. Nothing literatea"only what Beauty and some of the home folk scribbled. It's like a code. A code I've got to break before I know anything. First deciphering the letters, then puzzling out how the words, contorted by spelling, read, then trying to decide what these words, put together as they are, mean. Letters from Cotton Farm, dashed across sc.r.a.ps of paper, make my eyes want to snap shut. Beauty's chicken scratches embalmed in stale clouds of her perfume ache my head, reminding me that she's with him and I ain't. Reminding me that she knew him before I did. Quiet as I might keep it, maybe I wouldn't care so much if she knows him after I know hima"except that loving him is the only work I'm trained to do. I would cry if it wouldn't make my eyes red, if dabbing at them wouldn't etch little chicken scratch lines into my skin that say, "Death's coming and it's catching." That's what the lines on a lady's face spell, and every man can read it.

No chickens will walk across her face while she sleeps. She will remain in the garden of his mind, and in mine, an early summer rose, before a petal is dropped, almost sweet, light-scented. He will never see her grow old. Nothing more than that thickening of waist, a dropping and thinning of bosom that had already begun, and a slight thickening of her nose and reddening of her face. She will live forever, in some Charleston-in-late-summer-on-the-Battery garden of his mind, blooming forever, showered by sweet wine.

I don't drink. Not much. Lady slapped the first gla.s.s of wine right out of my hand. I was thirteen. She was fierce. "Do you want to look like Planter?" I had no idea in this world what she was talking about, but I was so tickled I almost wet myself. "His face gets redder and his nose gets thicker every drink he takes. It happens to the Irish, and it'll happen to you." Just like that she said it, then ran her fingers through my hair. It was the first time I had heard her speak aloud that I was Irish, that I was his. Always before it had been a known, unspoken thing. And the moment Lady spoke it, the truth seemed less true. I don't know why, and I wished it wasn't. But the moment she spoke it, my truth became less mine. As she ran her fingers through my hair, I could feel her pulling away from my body; I heard and felt the truth being s.n.a.t.c.hed away from me. I didn't see anything, but she could see Planter in me. And every day it was easier to see more of him in me, because every day she was coming to see other things in me she didn't like. And the more she saw what she didn't like, the more *:1

She was deserting me in little minutes, with small gestures, a half-combed curl, an un proffered gla.s.s of milk, a cast-aside field flower. That was it. I felt like a favored doll that had been sat back on the shelf after years between the pillows and the covers, just because a big blue box with white satin ribbon had arrived one cake-day and a prettier doll with raven curls had been pulled from the tissue paper. What I really felt like was the weed I had lovingly pulled from the yard and presented to her, only to find it later cast aside, un treasured desiccated. It's a thirst-provoking recognition, the sight of yourself abandoned. It's how I got the wine gla.s.s in my hand, and Lady slapped it out. And it wasn't the wine gla.s.s that got slapped out of my hand; it was her love for me.

had forgotten all this, how much things were changing at home then.

Folks around here always talk about before the war and after the war. But for me, looking back, I divide it between when Other still lived under my mother's skirts and when she didn't. There came a time when Other was moving beyond Mammy, and that time cleaved our world.

Mammy still hacked a green apple clean in two with a wave of her kitchen knife, but when Other's little friends would come for a birthday, barbecue, or Christmas visit, she no longer cheerfully took them to Mammy's kitchen for play or for slices of apple dusted with cinnamon. No more did Mammy sit up and rock and scold in the room while the golden girls gossiped. Other's friends grew too old for Mammy to slap on the bottom and push into a room. They wanted baths drawn, darker hair combed, and dresses pressed. Without thought or malice, they ordered Mammy to perform these services. Other and I both watched this. We both heard the high-pitched, singsong, acid-sweet demands. It wounded us both, but it hurt her more.

Me, who had watched Other order Mama around all my life, was used to it. A beating you get regularly just don't hurt as much. Other was shamed for Mammy and she was scared for herself. All children live in a world of terrors. Cotton farms are scarier places than most. Smelling where the power lay, Other drew near the two muskiest people on the placea"my mother and her father. Every single discovery of a weakness in my mother was another termite gnawing on the seasoned wood of her soul's foundation. And one day she kinda caved in. The day after that, she started building again.

If it was mine to speak over my sister's grave, I would remember this. First, she was afraid for Mammya"she hated the big blue life bruises Mammy suffered at the tiny hands of pale tyrants. She felt puny herself every time she was unable to protect Mammy. Then she hated Mammy for being hurt. When you can't protect a thing you love, it's natural to come to hate that thing a little bit more each and every time it's injured. Even if that thing is your Mammy's heart. Even if that thing is your daughter's body.

When Other got sick to death of all that hating, she decided the indignities were not so very awful. The lie worked. She forgave herself, she forgave the other little white girls who formed her circle of visitors, and she for gave Mammy.

Against her sisters and her closest friends, she claimed and held a grudge. Folk always found fault with Other for having precious few female friends. Mealy Mouth had aplenty; Other had few. Certainly it was true that most of Other's many enemies were female. But Other liked girls real good. I almost think the reason she loved Dreamy Gentleman so, was that there was so much boy in his man and so much girl in his boy. No, it would have been nearer to the truth to say Other didn't like to have anyone around who made Mammy's life a misery, and it was the girls close enough to demand intimate services that did the best job of that. Particularly her sisters. Particularly that bright beauty, China, whose beau she stole when she married Mealy Mouth's youngest brother. So she treated those girls, the ones who might have been her intimates, bad enough for them to stay away, stay clear, stay distanta"from her, and stay distant from Mammy, stay distant from her and Mammy. The possibility of life without Mammy she did not consider.

If Other bore her discomfort with little grace, Mammy bore it with less. Mammy gained fifty pounds one year, forty the next, twenty the year after that, and the slight, barely hundred-pound body in which she had walked into the house and slipped into Planter's bed vanished beneath another hundred pounds of protective flesh. I believe Mammy felt Other pulling away from her, and she determined to pull away from Planter before he could pull away. Overnight, Mammy became a stout old woman of fifty.

Lady was ripe then, thirty, and maybe she was just a little hungry for what she hadn't known when Planter, stone drunk, ploughed into her stone-dry and laudanum drugged body. She had felt no pleasure, had given no pleasure, felt no pain, gave no pain, as he flopped about, planting his seed in her soil. These were the days when she began to wonder if there might could be something more to these engagements. She was beginning to forget her girlhood.

At the same time Other was becoming uncomfortable with Mammy, she began to fall deeply in love with her mother, my Lady. I wanted to dash her brains out with a big rock. Other and Lady and Me. As they discovered each other, I discovered the higher temperatures of jealousy. The fever comes in different degrees. Other's love for Lady's tidy, tiny, sweet-smelling self, her slight but supple arms, the white, heaven-pillow bosom that lay corseted beneath Lady's modest gowns, brought sweat to my brow. It was a comfort to know, it remains a comfort to know, that Other died without ever once seeing her mother's b.r.e.a.s.t.s, b.r.e.a.s.t.s on which I sucked.

And Planter was beginning to see me anew. There was nothing strange between him and me. I was his daughter, and that meant more to him than it did to most men of his time and station when the daughter was brown. But the way he looked at me, Mammy didn't know if she was nervous or jealous. And not for the first time Lady felt the exact same thing.

Back then, I was hating Other so hard for breaking the ribbons binding Lady to me that I noticed all of this, but I didn't weave it into the fabric of my understanding of my life. Yet circ.u.mstance has left me rich in time to think about those days. Not working is a severe affliction. If I had been turned out to field work, perhaps I would never have whipped up so hard on my own mind. But everything changed when Other fell out of love with Mammy and in love with Lady. Everything changed when Lady fell out of love with me. Everything changed when Planter noticed that I was some kind of cross between his wife and his woman. Everything changed, and they sent me away.

I could see in Other's face the first moment it came to her the possibility that Mammy did for her not because she wanted to, but because she had to. Maybe Mammy loved her and maybe Mammy didn't. Slavery made it impossible for Other to know. "She who ain't free not to love, ain't free to love." Some folks are easy with that and some folks are not. Mainly the folks who think they wouldn't be loved are easy with it.

What Lady did for me, she did freely. And what she did for Other was done that way too. So I for sure got something. I can't decide if I'm grateful that R. will finally never have to choose between us, between me and Other. Sometimes when I feel neither lucky nor worthy, I'm grateful to get the win any way I get it. Sometimes I can taste beating her out and I am sad to be starved of it.

Sometimes it feels like the game is over and I'm putting up the checkers, and instead of me winning, she just lost, or more like she never showed up. And that's something else altogether from the way I want to feel, triumphant! Winner-ly. However it happened, I'm just glad not to lose.

Other is dead, and I'm sorry for it.

want to go to Mr. Frederick Dougla.s.s's house and I wouldn't be sorry to go without R. if I could go in propriety. I like moving among these Capital City Negroes. I met a young seamstress who mainly sews for white families, but she's going to do a bit of work for me. Rosie Woodruff is her name. There is something in this quick, trim African lady, something so city-like but clean that I had to drop my eyes to keep her from seeing that it was me who is admiring her. She wore a pitifully slim gold ring on her finger, and a skinnier brown-skin man was waiting for her at home, a plumber who came very lately from someplace deep South and had quick picked up a trade. Compared to this seamstress I have so mucha"or is it so little? Home feels far away. Every mile of the distance feels safe and getting safer. And every mile and hour it feels like something more of me is missing.

Say I walked around the monument to President Washington. It's a half-finished thing, an odd white thumb coming up out of dirt and a few blades of gra.s.s, a stump of a thing, blasting through the dome of a cracked-in-two sh.e.l.l of sky.

The light in this city is so different from the light at the farm in Georgia, from the light in Charleston. The sky here is colored the blue of a robin's egg if the sh.e.l.l had been heated up with yolk-colored, straight-from-heaven sun rays Always about me now is the sense of having died and gone to heaven.

Or died and gone to h.e.l.l. Died for sure. There is a thickness to the Washington air. It's heavy with water and mosquitoes. I wear this air like a coat that keeps me from the cold I know is coming. And there's a thickness to the river. You can't see very deep into it for all that it carries, and it's wide. The Potomac seems to roll in here from someplace and curve slowly through the city like it's a good place to stay.

When I sailed to Europe I did not remember my fear of water until I was upon it for some days. Or was it Mammy's fear I remembered? Or Mammy's Mammy's fear? Where does fear go to become fascination? Is it where rivers go to become sea? More than anything I saw of Venice (gondolas, masks), of London (pints, a palace), of Paris (sewer rats, stained gla.s.s) after so much land, I saw all the rivers. The Potomac brings back to me a remembrance of rivers. A remembrance of rivers and river cities.

Walking along the streets I hear different languages. And the people dress differently not just because they are rich or poor but because the people of Atlanta dress differently from the people of Boston, who dress differently from the Philadelphians and there is a good bit of everybody roving *round here.

In a way Washington, the Capital City, feels like an island. It belongs to nothing. I wonder what will be here in a hundred years? I wonder if anything will be here at all. The city is like a big pregnant woman Lying on her side while everybody fans her and wonders when she's going to give birth. Or will the baby blast the life out of her, trying to press its way into life? We hear stories about the French L'Enfant and the black man, Banneker, who was his a.s.sistant, and how they were tossed out of their own vision, out of this town of their creation, for dreaming too wildly. Are there tame dreams ? I wonder if this city with its strange circles, somehow designed to make one cannon do the work of six, but not generally sensible, I wonder if this city won't always be a kind of ha int struggling to wake to the everyday needs of a struggling rural people, struggling to fall back into L'Enfant's grand dream of a city of Senators and Amba.s.sadors? Did he not understand our Congressmen were not so long ago farmers and slaves? He didn't know that. I don't believe the European ever fully understands the American. But this city is built for tomorrow, and tomorrow I go the Dougla.s.ses' for tea.

,vwent to the Dougla.s.ses' for tea. Their home is more than a bit out of the way. Perched in the southeast quadrant of the city, high above a riverbank, Cedar Hill rewards the adventurous sojourner with a superb view across the Anacostia to the Federal city.

It's a new kind of home for me. There was a comfortable expanse but no formalitya"in the architecture. The formality was in the language, and now I borrow it for mine.

Was this the first party in my life I had attended alone, unescorted?

Has any other woman in the world arrived at a formal party on her own? I surprised myself by going; I surprised a few of the other guests, I expect. And I was glad I did, from the moment a gap-too the girl with an intelligent smile, gold-rimmed gla.s.ses, and long puffy-kinky hair opened the door and waved me in to join the crowd.

The party revolved around an immense cut-gla.s.s punch bowl filled to the brim with what tasted to be a mixture of fruit juice and tea. This bowl sat in the middle of a draped round table in a square entry hall. There were no big crystal bowls of flowers and no waiters, just shining faces and everyone helping themselves.

In the corner of the drawing room three young women from Fisk University in Nashville gave an impromptu rendition of "Soon I Will Be Done with the Troubles of the World," and this afternoon I felt I wouldn't have to leave this earth for it to be true.

We, Frederick Dougla.s.s and I, barely exchanged three sentences, but he looked at me as they sang, and I could see that he liked what he saw. As I was making my way through the crowd (so many sky-blue, so many cardinal colored gownsa"the effecta"due to the new dyesa"was quite unintentionally patriotic) after the song, twice the great man nodded as he smiled in my direction.

I never got too close to Dougla.s.s again, but I enjoyed a lively conversation with his son. I enjoyed this party. It was a kind of Negro open house, the kind of event to which I am not frequently invited. Mulatto mistresses of Confederate aristocrats have little standing in Negro society. And the Congressman was there.

G.o.d was showing off the day He created the Congressman. He is that good-looking. Or maybe G.o.d was just taking a stand. Who will deny the humanity of such a body, such a mind?

When the Congressman raised my hand to his lips, to kiss in greeting, I shook so hard, I was embarra.s.sed. I flushed. I don't remember what words he said. But he offered me his arm, and we walked together into the Dougla.s.ses' garden. As we walked, he talked. He said . some surprising't things.

The girls from Fisk, teased again into song, had launched into "Go Down, Moses." I was amazed by their performancea"the haunting combination of the raw and the refined. I told him so.

"Be not amazed," chastised the Congressman. "Be not " amazec .

"They will amaze the Queen. Why not me?"

"Who is Victoria compared to you? You've seen more than she. We see it daily. We are the chosen ones, the ones who sometimes s.n.a.t.c.h victory from the jaws of tragedy."

"To what tragedy do you refer ? "

"Do you require a particular tragedy?" For a moment he allowed himself the pleasure of being amused by the rhetorical question; then he waxed earnest. "Until it is transformed by our own energy, our own muscle, our own brain, every second of our very existence on these sh.o.r.es is tragic."

I hated hearing those words. I wanted to put my hand on his mouth and whisper, "Hush." Like I was Mama and he was Baby. But he's a man and I'm no mother, and he just kept talking. "And once transformed, even the least little bit, one drop of transformation, in the entire body of a life, makes the life victorious."

He touched the hard round muscle in the top of my arm, that golden hill of my inheritance, legacy of my childhood labor. Then he kissed his fingertips and pressed the kiss to my arm.

The release was as powerful as a little death on the green velvet couch. I was tired and wanting to hear more. He told more: "Just like one drop of blackness in the entire body of a man make him black."

What would it be like to have a drop of him in me? To keep from fainting, I changed the subject and gave him my most frozen smile.

Now he talked to me of the events of the day, expecting me to be proud of his accomplishments. I didn't know enough of the events of the day to truly value his part, but I knew enough of men to value the way he held his selfa"the way even Dougla.s.s deferred to him and leaned closer to hear what the Congressman had to say when he allowed his voice to drop down low.

In that moment, the very moment Dougla.s.s leaned toward him to claim some word of his as their secret, I wondered if the Congressman could be mine. And I laugh at myself for wondering. I have been R."s, but no one had ever been mine. I have never possessed a man. I had never hoped to possess a man. Never even wished to possess a man's soul, for it seemed too close to slaving. But now I am wondering if he could be mine, and if I knew if he could be mine, I might attempt possession.

And wondering if I could possess the Congressman (as I turned away from him, all the time stealing sideways glances back at him, while moving back toward Dougla.s.s's son) raises the possibility of me possessing R.

Everything about ownership is changing: land, people, money, gold into foreign currency, foreign currency back into foreign gold, and gold back into money in our banks. It doesn't seem in this time of hurricanes and storms and other acts of G.o.d, with winds of every sort of change in the air, that hearts would be any different. Why couldn't she who couldn't own, who now owned forty acres and a mulea"if I could own a former plantationa"could I not own a planter's heart?

R. needs to get home soon. I've sent him a note. "I need what a man who's gone can't do. I love you. Speed your return." I wrote those words in my head while I was looking at Dougla.s.s, looking at the Congressman, and some young fool was mumbling to me. Could he, either he, which he, if both could be mine, who would I have? Could I have either?

But the gap-too the girl, now in a cloak, caught the Congressman's eye, and he moved away, leaving the party with only a distant bow in my direction. And I was left to lesser pleasures of observation.

The dresses were modest and trim; there was an abundance of simple good food. Plates were eaten off laps on stairs after folk were seated on every available chair. Many of the young gentlemen stood.

Dougla.s.s has traveled to England and has many English friends. One English gentleman referred to the streamers down the back of a rather saucy bonnet as "follow-me-my-lads," and the back porch burst into laughter as the brown girl in question gaily skipped across the lawn. These are new and lighter days.

Several of the visitors were students at Howard University. Some, as I have already written, were visiting from down South.

I am trying to suck it all in deeply. Trying to feel how this place feels different from the farm when all the white folks were away. That's when we had our holiday, not Christmas. There were times when all of them went to Atlanta or Savannah or Charleston, when the overseer was suddenly taken sick up in bed. Strange how overseers so often took sick when the family was away during the holidays. That is when we had our Christmas.

And now it should be Christmas every day, but it is not. What it is, is the days before. Working, getting ready. Everything now is expectation, hope, waiting for Christmas to come but we don't know when.

,ffimorning I went out walking in my new neighborhood, Georgetown, and I came upon Tudor Place. It's just a house. Just another rich man's house, but I wanted to weep. Weep for beauty, weep for home, weep for not believing Garlic when he told about all the places he had been and what he had seen. Here was the model for our round porch with columns. Here a different variation of the theme of five portions. Garlic's building, Tata, is much more beautiful. It's not just what will they let us be; it's what will we let ourselves be.

I wish I was a man and I could vote. I'd be a man if I could vote now. So much of who we will let ourselves be will be decided by who we will vote for and will we vote and how long will they let us vote.

There's a cartoon I cut out of Harper'sweetly I'm looking at it now. It's a drawing of Jefferson Davis, him that was the President of the Confederacy, Davis, with a big cloak wrapped all around him. His face is long and thin, his eyes so dark, when you glance at the drawing it looks like a skull with a hat and hair, like a skeleton wearing a cloak. And this Jeffersona"I like to call him by his first namea"he looks like a figure on stage, like a demon sneaking off to do wrong, except he's in the center of the picture, but off to the side is the center of this picture, and Jeff, he was standing there, looking back into the Senate chamber at a Negro man taking his seat, his Senate seat. A deep dark Negro man surrounded by compatriots is what it looked like. And the Negro man is reading. His hands are on one book, and another book has slid off his table to the floor at his feet. He's propped up and on books. His colleagues are turned to question him, and he's ready.