That's what it looked like to me. There's a caption: TIME WORKS WONDERS. I do not know if it was meant to be for or against this dark legislator. Certainly it was the truth. Under that t.i.tle was written the words of Iago, and between Iago's name and his speech was inserted, in parentheses, the name "Jeff Davis." I read Oth.e.l.lo again after I saw this cartoon. The speech says, "For that I do suspect the l.u.s.ty Moor hath leapt into my seat: the thought whereof both like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards." If I had been Oth.e.l.lo's friend, Desdemona would still be alive, and they'd have plenty of pretty babies.

Oth.e.l.lo's just a creation. Maybe just like me. But __.

Robert B. Elliott be real. He be born in Ma.s.sachusetts. He studied at Eton College in England and now he's in the Congress. Robert B. Elliot be real and my Congressman knows him. James Rapier studied in Canada and now he's in Congress. He's another "historical figure." And my Jeems, his beloved Smalls, I've found all about him now, for Jeems's sweet sake. Smalls was wholly self educated and wholly factual. He taught himself to read and write. How you do that? John Roy Lynch, he worked in a photographer's studio and he looked across an alley into a white schoolroom and followed his lessons from a distance right into the Mississippi house and on into the Congress of these United States. He merits a line in anybody's history of these United States. But it's one thing to read about them and quite another to smell a man's scent, hear his quicker mind responding to your own quick thought. Tick-tock. It's an altogether different thing.

There are facts can poison you dead as a.r.s.enic. I have long known this to be true. There are facts can get you drunker than sipping whiskey straight. This is a sweet and new discovery. O brave new world! Sweet Jesus! Let me know some more about it! Please G.o.d!

7."s returned. He looks a thousand years old. His hair is turning white, and he has let it grow long. This is a Southern city, but he doesn't fit in here. He strides about in black silk and velvet and looks like the ghost of the Confederacy, a sauntering relic haunting the place. Like the evil G.o.dmother at the baby's christening. Why do I write that? I feel like the princess who is cursed at birth. And they try to change the curse, try to move her to safety. Why does R. look like the evil G.o.dmother? Who looks like the prince? Who does R. look like?

His face looks so different in this light. I call out to myself, "Who is this man I lay with?" and I have no response. This man is unknown to me. Perhaps even unknowable by me. And maybe that is exactly what I love about my man. Not knowing him feels so familiar, as familiar as the smell of whiskey, and leather, and horses, and a certain cologne, yes. He is the stuff of Lady's dreams, my dark-eyed gambler and arrogant risk-taker. The arrogance was essential ... If he has anything to say to me, he should just say it.

one of our Senators, a gentleman from the Eastern Sh.o.r.e of Maryland, sent a bushel basket of Chesapeake Bay oysters *round to the townhouse in honor of R."s return last evening. People heard that he had a wife and that she died. Neither of us was hungry for supper, so we ate the oysters for breakfast.

He said I looked like a mermaid. I said he looked like King Neptune. He did look just like some briny sea G.o.d, with a mud-caked sh.e.l.l in his fingers, sucking down the juice after the plump-jiggle slid down his throat. I had to smile at him, and smile at the memory of wanting him to slide down my throat. My desire for him had been so much more than distraction or work. Once upon a time I was as hungry for him as today we are hungry for breakfast.

Love and desire are not the same thing. Most often they don't even live in the same house. They should but they don't. He promised me a trip back across the water, to Europe, a grander tour, ensemble, together. He didn't see me shudder.

For his teeth were finding a pearl just at that moment. He plucked it from his mouth with his fingers. The pearl was blue when you looked at it one way and gray when you looked at it in another. It was very small and not so exactly round. He balanced it on the tip of his pointer finger, and I s.n.a.t.c.hed it with my tongue and swallowed.

I want to surprise him. At least once again. I want to insist without words that we will not just be restless, and prosperous, and contained. I want to have more than a liquor bottle to keep me in my skin, to keep me in my house. Once he could rock me into my skin, rock me out of my imagination into the marrow of my bones. He did that for me and I remember it. Will every kiss I kiss be in remembrance of him, who he used to be ?

I swallowed the pearl, and tears appeared in his eyes, tears I had never seen before. He knows our pa.s.sion plays hide-and-seek with us now. Rain falls in our hearts. Rain, rain, go away! Cindy and R.B. want to play! Oysters are no breakfast food.

As if in sympathy, it began to rain outside. After breakfast I went to my room to write a letter to Beauty, a letter full of gloom. "It's raining now. Heaven's tears are washing over us. In the Capital City this is the sacrament that subst.i.tutes for breakfast with Beauty..." I had just written those words when R. walked into my room without knocking.

He kissed me on the back of the neck and dropped a pack of letters onto my little desk. I asked him what it was. A smile curled onto his lips, sharp and tight, as dangerous a curve as the curve of my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Sneering, he was an especially good-looking man; nastiness brought a flash of' earlier days" across his face. I had to tell myself to breathe, because he took my breath away. He flicked that packet onto my desk in a manner these city Negroes might call "hincty," something akin to but different from "uppity," with a studied nonchalance that barely covers insolence and smells of fear.

For the first time, in all the time I had known him, he was trying too hard. The gesture was, as the Creoles (who, though few and far between in number, lend their great charm to this city, when they can be found) say, "un peu trop," just a little too much. Or were all his gestures that way and I just was seeing it for the first time? Certainly this gesture was de trop and his words were the cherries on the cake. "Your manumission papers," he said, without hurting me at all.

He walked out of the room without saying another word.

They were love letters. The letters Lady had written to Cousin and the letters he had written to her. I had heard from Miss Priss that Lady, in her delirium on her deathbed, had called out someone's name. It was hard to hear what she was saying, but Miss Priss thought she was calling Feleepe, the name of her cousin who had been killed in the duel. The cousin who died in New Orleans just before Lady married.

Lady herself had told me some little about him. Once, even, holding me in her arms, she had laughed and cried, laughed and cried, rocking me 11gback and forth, kissing my head, whispering, "I wish you were my child, I wish you were my child." I thought very little about it. I had so long and reverently wished for Lady to be my mother, her wish sounded to my ear only natural and true. It's hard, having natural wishes in an unnatural time.

There is no difficulty in deciphering these letters. Each of them wrote a beautiful hand. Each was urgently trying to convey information of supreme importance, and they felt safe, so their sentences ran frankly naked. Lady and Cousin were beautiful children, bold and unhurt. For a time, in the early pages, that untested boldness served them as bravery and lent clarity to every utterance. Later, when I knew her, Lady's every utterance was dressed, and all meaning obscured and distorted, the way her body was obscured and distorted by whalebones and hoops and cinches and pantalets and all manner of torturous frippery. But at the first all was plain and simple.

P--,.

I add no dear or darling, your name alone is prayer! I tremble in fear of G.o.d's judgment, for I know I am guilty L.L.

of idolatrous worshipa"of you. How can I love G.o.d with all my heart when I have no heart? You have my heart. I beg you to go to church on Sunday, for it is the only way my heart can go and I may see you there. Ask Daddy soon. I am not too young. And Mother loves you so. I hear her call, her greeting, "Sweet son of own departed sister." How she does go on, Mamma. This house is neither cool enough nor hot enough. Take me away from it to some place where the air is not the temperature of my skina"where mosquito bites are not the only thing I feel.

Dearest Girl, Darling E Dearest and darling are your name. Belonging to you alone. There are other Elizabeths, other Emilys, other E s, but there is only one dearest girl, you. I shall give you fire and ice when we are married. I'll rub ice on your wrists in July and build great big fires in December. Don't you swoon. P.

P.

Mother found your last letter and took to weeping. "What does he mean, what does he mean? " When I tried to explain, she interrupted me, saying, "Oh, it's all too clear, all too clear." I have no idea what she's so upset about. You should ask Daddy at once. I think they don't believe you really want to marry me.

Your E. My dear E Your father refuses to let me marry you. I asked him to state his reservation, and he could say only that your mother disapproves of the match. I must talk to my Aunt. P.

P.

Mother does nothing but cry. She took me on her lap and whispered, between sobs, "If it was possible, I would allow it." If I do more than bow in your direction at church, she will remove me from the city. She says the curse of Haiti is upon us.

P." what does Haiti have to do with this? I have my little income from there and you have yours. It should buy us a little freedom. This all sounds like a nightmare my old Mammy used to tell me about ill-used slaves coming to haunt families that were cruel to them. Sometimes they scared the people so bad, their hearts beat right out of their chests, then stopped beating at all. E. Darling, Your mother, my aunt, refuses to see me at all. I'm just about to go to the graveyard to talk with my mother. P.

E.

You must write. It's been days since I spoke with you. I come to your house and am refused entrance. Have the gates of h.e.l.l opened and swallowed you whole? P.

P.

What do you know of Haiti? I don't believe I've ever seen it on a map.

I don't believe I'll ever take another teaspoon of sugar in my life.

Mother doesn't know that I know why she believes we can't marry. The reason doesn't constrain me. Doesn't shackle my heart from yours. But my tongue is locked in the prison of my mouth. You would have to make your own decision, and I do not know what you would decide, and if I tell you what I know, you will never be yourself again, and if I do not tell you, we will never be what we might be. If you wish to know, send word and I will tell you. Your cousin E.

123 .

Darling E. Was our great-grandmother a murderess? Did she kill a hundred slaves because one displeased her? I refuse to be afraid or ashamed of decades-old indiscretions of my progenitors. Tell me at once, and I will be as I remain, who I am, the man who wants to marry you. P.

P.

Our great-grandmother was not a murderess. She was a Negresse. E. Dear E. I am surprised you put those words to paper. I am proud of you, very proud, and I should still like to marry you. I spoke with Aunt. Your mother sees no life for us that will not destroy the rest of the family. She says her confinement and the confinement of her sister, my mother, were agony, greatly lessened but not ended by the arrival of perfect pink infants. She says they watched the tips of our ears and ridge of skin around our fingers every night for signs of darkening. I asked her what she would have done if she had seen the tip of your ear turn the color of one of the walnuts just falling. Even if you had turned the color of b.u.t.ter, if she had turned the color of b.u.t.ter, I would have pUt the pillow on her face and I would have 124 cried. Color comes in so slow over a period of ten days, if you do it quick even the Daddy don't see the dark in the baby. Of course the Mammy knows. They've seen all manner of white-looking n.i.g.g.e.r children. What farce this is. It's a pity Moliere didn't live in this city and this part of the country. Instead of writing the Imaginary Invalid, he could have written the ... what would we call ourselves? n.i.g.g.e.rs Who Knew Not? Can you be a Negro if you don't know you're a Negro? I would have said a n.i.g.g.e.r knows he's a n.i.g.g.e.r. Always. Absolutely. But what if he doesn't? So .. . we are each to pour a little more milk in the coffee and not tell. We were the ones who were not supposed ever to knowa"the first to be white not black with a secret. See how well our love serves us. If we had not fallen in love, we might never have discovered our darkness. P. P. Write to me. I know you're in New Orleans. Everyone says you're drinking too much, fighting, dueling with anyone willing to walk across your shadow. You said you would never marry anyone but mea"but you did not say you would marry me. Of course I wish I did not know what I know now. I wish I was not what I am now, but if I had to do it over again and I could either stay innocent or love you and hold for a minute the possibility of being your bride, I would choose knowledge and agony over innocence and no hope of marrying you. Could we not go someplace where no one knows us and be who we are? E. Dear E. Strange as it may seem, it is not as hard for me to imagine having a Negresse for my bride as it is for me to imagine you having a Negro for your husband and in your bed. It feels blasphemous. Even when I know the Negro so well and know his desire for you to be as hot and pure as fire. If you will marry me, I will marry you when I return. Perhaps we will move to a plantation down in the Indies. I have been sniffing around for possibilities down here. Port cities are good for possibilities. P. Inside the last of the envelopes were two folded yellowing newspaper articles. One told the story of a deadly duel between hotheaded dandies down in the Quarter. The other the story of the premature death of a well loved son of Savannah under mysterious circ.u.mstances. Same story, different tellers; only the fact of death remained. at her never knew. R. received the letters from Garlic; he got the letters from Mammy. She got the letters from Lady. How Lady came to possess both sides of the most important correspondence of her life is not hard to imaginea"she kept those he sent her and, rather than destroy anything her hand had touched or risk disclosure, he had returned hers to her. I could only imagine how many times Lady had read and re-read the words that did and didn't change her life. The pleasure must have been exquisite for her, to take so much risk with her daughters' lives, to risk the damage "an unveiling" would have done to her life. I can only imagine that when she handed the letters to Mammy, she expected Mammy to burn them. She expected the secret her mother never wished to tell her to die with her. She left her daughters to carry their babies without fear of their own children darkening up.

They're walking over my grave again. I know why Precious cried in the night. I remember finding the clothespin in her bed, the lemon oil on her elbows. I know all about whitening up; they did what they could for me.

I wonder why Garlic gave R. the letters. I wonder if he knew what they contained. He didn't read or write, and he wasn't a man to think words were important. I'll have to ask him, but I'm guessing that he left the letters for R. out of simple honesty, out of a desire to give him a gift. What a strange moon we are under. With this gift what has he robbed R. of? Or perhaps it was simple spitefulness.

Mammy might have told Garlic what the letters contained. He was too careful a man to let them be read by just anybody. If he had been curious, he would have asked me to read the letters to him. I don't believe he paid any attention to them at all. The letters were not the only things R. brought back with him from Cotton Farm. He also brought me a ring.

It was stone-less gold band without ornamentation. Inscribed on the underside were Lady and Feleepe's initials. R. raised my hand to his lips; I thought he was going to kiss it. Instead, he slipped the Charleston ring from my finger and dropped it into his watch pocket.

Old light, some yellow light, almost an ancestral light, flickered in R."s eyes, now framed by creases, a hundred crinkling curved lines that changed, creating a sparkling effect as he dropped to his knee. He was slow and unsteady as he lowered himself, but he was certain of his destination. He looked like what he wasa"a courtier from an age gone by. I found the effect of effort wed to a feebleness en clearing Gallantry is never so visible as when it is doomed. I had a portrait in my mind of R.a"a portrait of prosperity and beneficencea"but a new portrait was forming in my minda"the portrait of a lonely man. The more he resembled this new portrait, the closer I came to falling in love with him.

SCongressman sent me flowers and a note that R. found charming. R. thanked me for helping him "cultivate" his "new friend." I let him think I was doing him a favor. The flowers were yellow roses and they reminded me of home. As I re-read these pagesa"and I do that more often than I write new ones these daysa"I find myself looking backward. I spent most of my life looking toward the front room of my life, toward escape or change, toward some new way to be, some new place to stand, some new person to stand with. And now, thirty years into my life, my life half over, I am always looking backward, trying to rearrange my memories, rearrange and dust, celebrate and protect, all those antique memories, sticks that came into the house of my mind without me paying them no mind at all, sticks that have become my treasure.

How is that? Once when I lived looking forward, I never thought about me or allowed myself to feel any thing but pleasure or joy. It was a kind of trick. My special trick; all other feelings provoked an immediate invisible sleep. I appeared to be awake but I was gone and dreaming. It was a satisfying trick, and I performed it like a circus dog. I never remembered anything unkind, never remembered or indulged my jealousy. Living in my own little house which R. visited in Atlanta, I swept all darkness away immediately under the rug of my springy bangs. And now someone's pulled the rug away. In fact, I find more hair in my brush every day than I wish, and all those things I swept away have shown themselves to still be there. And I have no idea in the world what to do with those unpleasant memories.

How is it that the South, the world of chivalry and slavery and great white houses and red land and white cotton, is gone, forever gone, in the dust, blown off and away, and it is only in me and my memories and in my soul-carving fear that the Southland lives on? Carved or seared on my heart, why does it seem so completely un.o.bscurable? Why do I remember what can never help me? Why do I remember my world better than I remember myself? So much I know about what I saw; so little I know about my own eyes. I'm tired. My bones are starting to ache. The b.u.t.terfly sleeps softly crimson on my brown face, and I will sleep well tonight.

Was it just this morning we ate oysters for breakfast? I don't feel very well. I wonder if swallowing the pearl will kill me. It can't be the oysters. R. ate them too, and he feels fine. An old melody I made up in Cotton Farm days floats on the waves of nausea to the front of my brain. "The moon's all worn out and silver, trying to climb up the hill. The moon is just a sliver, I believe it never will. The moon I want to wish on, I'm waiting for it still." The moon that hangs outside the brick-faced window of our Georgetown townhouse is a worn-out sliver. I feel as exhausted as it looks. I hum the old melody and realize that I have hummed it before, because he, padding toward me in his silk dressing gown, is humming it too.

He came to me in the bed and we comforted each other. His white hair falling on my shoulder. I kissed his hairy ears and his crepe-y neck, I stroked his prosperity swollen belly. He strokes the almost flat, still firm flesh of my stomach, and I wonder if I am going to have a baby. Sometimes morning sickness doesn't just come in the morning.

I never had any idea why no baby had come. It was just an unasked-for unthanked blessing. I have no hope. I hold no illusion that he would cradle my baby the way he cradled hers. I believe, I believed, I will continue to believe, that he loves me more than he loved her. That he loved me first and fiercer, that the very first time he saw her what drew him in was not her love for the fey one, the ephemeral boy-man, Dreamy Gentleman, but it was that she looked so much like me, looked like me but was a bright light-of-the day possibility. Dreamy Gentleman was the man his father and Charleston thought they wanted R. to be. Other was the prize to win that would prove He was more than He. But that is not why he wanted her; he wanted her as an echo of me. But I know this, this I remember, the men don't love the brown babies as they love the pale white ones.

aybe some men do. I think of Garlic and how he never showed Other the fondness he showed me. I think of Mr. Frederick Dougla.s.s; he seemed proud indeed of his Amba.s.sador son. I wonder about the Congressman. There's not much to wonder, is there? I blush to think of his happiness were he ever to discover his seed growing in my belly. I am not with child. I saw it this morning. I wonder if I can still make a baby. If I could ever make one. I never bled too much. We who clean the sheets and drawers know all about blood and talk about it too. You clean the sheets, you know a lot of things. It was never mine to wash the sheets at the plantation, but I washed my many at Beauty's; I am coming to feel I am a sheet washing woman, a prelude to birth, a handmaid to birth, but not the creator herself.

I know he can have babies, because he gave Other one. I want a little loaf of my own rising in the oven. I cannot stay in this city here with him. It's too much. I have accepted the injustice of all of them loving her different because she was white. If she was just a n.i.g.g.e.r like me but got the chance to live white, it's too much to bear. But maybe that's just the way it is, so I'm broke. Right in half.

he was just a n.i.g.g.e.r. Their baby was just a high yellow gal in a blue velvet riding habit. It's like she's died again. I ask him what it all means to him, and he makes a joke of it and says, "I guess they're right. Once you go black, you don't go back." He said that to me and I laughed, but he didn't think it was funny and I didn't either.

Lady. Lady love. Lady my love. Mamalady. What does it mean, river deep and summer green to me, that you are black and he was black, and you still wanted to marry him, and have his little may-be-brown babies? Could you have loved me just that much and I didn't know it? Was it always there for me to suck in on the tip of your pap and I didn't taste it, in your eye when you watched Other? In your eye when you watched Planter? The trick you played on him. And what about the trick you played on me? That I was one flavor and she wasa"othera"and better than me? Other and better than my mother?

There was a day you almost told me. I must have been about six years old. Too old to be carried or lifted anymore. Old enough for more little jobs. You p.r.o.nounced me "herb finder." When the overseer complained to Planter, "You wife is making a pet out of that pickaninny" and Planter tried to embarra.s.s you by quoting the overseer's charges, you lied without hesitation, "Every fine family in Savannah has one, and what precisely does our overseer know about the care and feeding of a tribe of Southern aristocrats?" You held your chin up in the air when you said that; you let your voice shake with pride of birth. The husband could see for himself the blue blood pulsing in the vein of his wife's temple.

Planter was petrified and chastened. He didn't move a finger, blink an eye; it was as if he had turned to stone. The unspoken word "pineswamppeckawood" hung in the air, an invisible syllabic sword of Damocles, and he'd be d.a.m.ned if it fell on his head. He would not stand too close to the overseer. For all his Planter swagger, for all his luxurious clothes, for all his acres, his only genuir.e link to the aristocracy was his lady, whose lily-white "quality" hand seemed raised to draw a line that placed him on the trash side of the social divide.

All white skins are not created equal; he knew that; and I learned it as I watched them engage in the only argument of their marriage. That he had offended the dignity of magnolia maidenhood and made his lady fainting mad was obvious. He had sinned against the only creed he had sworn to, the credo of milady's fragility, the creed that balanced the vow to protect the particular delicate needs of particular delicate ladies against all the ugly peculiar Southland customs. He let her wina"then resumed his place at the victor's side. When the word "peckawood" fell, it was on the overseer's heada"right out of Planter's mouth.

After that I was the official herb finder. When guests came to call, I would busy myself with this occupation and thus be away from the house, away from prying eyes, insolent mouths. When the visitors were gone, Lady and I would have dignified reunions in which she would inspect my bounty. Lady would draw pictures of what she wanted me to find. Sometimes when guests would stay a length of days, she would send me out with a long list and I would make a kind of camp down near the cabins and stay away until I had a.s.sembled all the specimens.

With my bounty she would make little sachets and cures. There was a sachet she made for her own pillow that helped her fall asleep.

I seldom wore shoes and never on these rambles. I was proud of the calluses on my feet that allowed me to move nimbly and quickly over the farm; the calluses on my feet were the only part of my body I found superior to Other's. When my color deepened in the summer, I envied her more.

One day, at the end of an unusually long midsummer expedition, I was pa.s.sing near the cabins when some of the "chil'rin" started teasing me, saying, "You done ripened right up," ""Bout time to pick her," "Think she'll fall from the tree herself," "Juicya"fruit, juicy-fruit." I ran back home, crying all the way.

But I didn't drop my herbs.

Later that night Lady took me down to where some poor white folks lived. A baby was due at their house and they had no money for a doctor, and even if they had, there weren't none about. She took me on the pretense of needing someone to tote her things into the house.

When we were alone I told her I wished I was white like her. I told her that I hated the color of my skin. She made a list of everything that was brown and beautiful in the world. She named walnut sh.e.l.l sand fall leaves. She named tree bark and caramel. She named mola.s.ses, she named syrup, she named golden honey and sweet b.u.t.ter, 136.

the top of a cornbread, and finally she named the heel of a loaf of white bread. She was still naming and I was still crying, only harder. She opened her mouth to speak. She said, "I'm ... I'm ... I'm tired, and we need to go back home."

Then she took Feleepe's ring, the ring I wear as I write this, from the bodice of her dress, where it lay knotted into a handkerchief. I had seen it on her finger a time or two when we were alone. She took the ring and pressed it into the palm of my hand. The day I left Cotton Farm I pressed it back into her palm.

Garlic told R. that Mammy gave him the ring. She say Lady gave her the ring. Mammy say she want Garlic to give the ring to R. and she wanted R. to give the ring to me.

My mother, her Mammy. I never had a name to call her that I was fond of. Can you give somebody a name after she's in the ground? Can you hear me, Mama? Do you know which one of you I am calling? Black mama, white mama. Narrow mama, wide mama. None of that is anything. Mama I knew and Mama I didn't. I wonder if Mammy didn't see me as something like a Benedict Arnold, looking and telling all she see. Never learning the rule of silence. The rule of talk talk talk and don't tell nothing. Just the opposite of Lady, who spoke so little and said so much. Let me be greedy. I hope when I die I go to heaven. I know both my Mamas are praying for me. I expect, if I get to heaven, the first sound I'll hear is the sound of Mammy's crimson petticoat, the rustle of her heavenly garment moving toward me. We're going to a ball tonight. I'm going to wear rustling taffeta of my own.

See days ago R. handed me an opened envelope addressed to him, along with unopened letters addressed to me. Inside his envelope was a stiff cream-colored card edged in gold, covered all over in flowing black writing. He was invited to attend a ball; he was invited to bring a guest. A ball on Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue. He invited me to ..

um nm.

The host has a long unp.r.o.nounceable name with many consonants, but I am practicing p.r.o.nouncing it in preparation for my part in honoring the visiting dignitary from Russia. Rosie says she can finish the bronze taffeta just in time. R. says I must not look too pretty, or an impoverished Count will attempt to carry me back to his crumbling-down castle beneath the snows of Siberia.

We rode to the ball in R."s new carriage. I wore the new gold velvet cape with which R. surprised me this morning. We are becoming Washingtonians.

Some visitors to the Capital City refer to Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue as Emba.s.sy Row. Many of the streets in Washington are named after states. The wide main streets in the middle of the city are named after important states. The White House is located on Pennsylvania Avenue. Virginia Avenue supports the banks of the Potomac. There's nothing of importance on Georgia Avenue, nothing at all.

I was not prepared for the Emba.s.sy. It's a citified building, ornate and fortress-like, gray and tall, with narrow windows. Of course there is no porch, there is no drive. There's a gate, a wall, and then the street. We are in a world city, and world cities exclude before they separate.

Music and candlelight illuminate the general darkness of the large and drafty room. White-skinned, white gloved servants pa.s.s trays of champagne and odd little bits and pieces of smoked fish and boiled eggs decorated with piped mayonnaise and bits of chopped vegetable. A waiter who speaks no English offers me a serving of caviar and I say, "I would love a silver spoon of inky, fishy, gray-black grits." Champagne spurts from R."s mouth. We are laughing together between nibbles of caviar on toast.

I tell him that Russian princesses live in crumbling down villas, not palaces. He is pleased with me.

R. talks at the gentlemen and I dance with them; dance with the one he's not talking at.

I like the swirl. It's the swirl I like. The swinging round in circles, the bouncing back and forth, the swirl. The way the colors blend and streak, the way the music gets louder and softer as you swing closer to it and away. Though I wear a gown of bronze, it appears that lilac is the color of the season. It's here in every shade: shiny lilac and muted lilac, bluer lilac and grayer lilac, lilac almost silver and lilac turning into purple. Beaded lilac and lilac brocade. And here and there the new shade of blue and the new shade of red. The swirl. The way it's just like eyes-wide-open dreaming. I would dance with any feet in shoe leather.

The candles burn down. The band gets louder and lazier. I twirl with some gentleman from Boston, a former abolitionist, come to Washington to help create the new national university. I believe it's called, or to be called, the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution. R. talks to someone from Treasury. "What can he be saying now?" my dance partner teases. I would blush, but the red's already on my face. The b.u.t.terfly. What is he saying now?

Something he's said before and before. Something he's said before.

That's what he says now. And he won't hear what's being said now. There's money to be made after the war. Each year it seems a little more. There's money to be made after the war, but R."s not making very much of it. He doesn't feel the tides the way he did, or the wind. He doesn't listen the way he did. He's somewhere else all the time now, responding to new acts with old gestures fragilely bridging past to present, ending his span before the future is reached.

Of course, he made money during the war and before the war. Why is it called that way? Collected money, gathered money, from where it had been, resting or clinched, into a grand green pile somewhere behind the doors of his bank. All those words would be better than "made." Behind the door of his bank is a place R. has never taken me. It's the only remaining place I know of for sure.

This gentleman from the Smithsonian is asking me if I knew that James Smithson, the man whose will left the money to start the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution, if I knew James was illegitimate. "He was born James Lewis Macie. He took his father's name only after his mother died." I smile and start listening a bit more attentively. I didn't know this and it does interest me. He says James's mother was an English lady. It's good to know the daughters of English gentility have illegitimate children too. "The times are changing. Barriers are falling," he says mid-spin. But I'm thinking: I know dimly of clubs and weddings, lines across which no colored can step. Not even me with he. He goes to places I cannot go.

And I'm still playing p.r.o.noun games. Who is object; who is subject; is it me, or am I it?

Someone has tapped on the shoulder of the Smithsonian fellow, and I never discover how Macie became Smithson; my waist is released from his vise. The music slows down. I'm in the arms of the dark prince, my Congressman. My new partner and I move in a glorious syncopation. I stop wondering about the places I cannot go and go. This is the first territory into which I have entered into which R. cannot follow.

Prancing across the floor with the Congressman, I hold in my breath, press the back of my tongue against the roof of my mouth to make my chin, my throat, look taut. I want him to see me like I used to be. I want him to confuse the past with the present. I want the past and the future to fuse. I want to scare my Congressman into believing the things I believe about the future. I want to possess him. What would it mean to make him mine? By what skill would I achieve the capture? Is it more than that? I want him to want me. And it's so hard to tell if he does.

He whispered strange stories into my ear. "My Daddy," says he, "had such a headache, my Mama hit him upside the head with a skillet, and I popped out, full dressed in overalls, ready to pick a day's cottona"just so Mama could take a day's rest."

"I don't believe you."

"Find a record that proves me wrong. A birth certificate. A baptism sheet. Anything."

"It's tragic those things don't exist."

"I've told you what I think of tragedy."

I wanted to hit him upside the head, but I didn't have a skillet.

When I was short and lived on the farm, I knew my way to a field of exotic wild verbena with orange-colored flowers and lemon scent. They were favorites of Lady's, but this verbena looked like another wild herb that was poisonous. You could tell the difference by looking at the petalsa"one had tapered petal sand one had squat squared petals. I no longer remember which was which. Things I thought I would never forget I have forgotten. Things I have prayed to forget I have remembered. He loves me, he loves me not. Once I stood in a field of somebody else's flowers and had my way with them. Now I've got a man but ain't got no way to have with him or without him. Mammy hated when I talked that way. But I knew that language too. It comes back to me now. Surrounds me now in this Capital City. Now I have a man and a house, but my house has no garden. I don't know where the wild flowers grow *round here. I have no way to know. And I don't know how I would know. I possess no way to know. None at all.

And I can't recall how to tell a curing from a killing herb.

He has interesting memories that trot out to me in well-turned phrases, my Congressman. His smile is quick. He has the habit of charm. He is a public feast that is gnawed daily, not my private meal. What would I not give for a corner of this bread to call my own? That's easy. My freedom. This feeling I call "free" I would trade for nothing. Not one thing. And I don't even know good what it is. What it is. But I know I saw it, like a crack of light coming in under the door, saw it in the Congressman's eyes. Felt it tingling on the places on my arms he touched while we danced. Feel it in the circle of the dance. Around again and around again till everything collapses or disappears. I felt that free-y feeling in his arms. Now we slither around the ballroom. Am I the invisible feet of the snake? Or am I the horse prancing?

Did I know right then what it was, or was it the moment later? The moment when R. tapped the Congressman's shoulder, waited imperiously for the Congressman to step away, then pulled me closer, like a shackle snapping on my wrist, felt the hand that had signed the paper to buy me caress the nape of my neck. Just as the feeling was escaping, I could named it, free-y. But it was gone, and that old familiar feeling, that comfortable feeling, of being possessed came to me. We danced something gallant, in the old lazy high-stepping way. The Congressman walked away and off the dance floor; the Negro man walks away. R. and I are left on this dance floor become a stage. This is our cake walk. Everybody looks at us high-step.

A Confederate and his quadroon. Redeemed I was, I was sold and he bought me. I should let him be my G.o.d; I have let him be my G.o.d. He redeemed me and I have loved him for it. Where do I go, to go and sin no more? The Congressman walked away, arm in arm with some young dark lady, the gap-too the girl. He walked away as R. twirled me on my aching toes.

am trying to remember; but I don't know what I have forgotten. I wish I had run down the road alongside Other toward Mammy. I wish Other had got there first but Mammy kept looking down the road for me. I wish Other looked up to Mammy with pleading eyes. I wish I arrived at Mammy's knee. I wish Mammy bent over and lifted me from my feet. I wish Mammy kissed me as Other watched. I wish Mammy loved me and Other saw it.

But that's never going to happen. She's dead now. She's dead, and all I think about is not her and where she is and what she is now; I still think only of her and what I want and what I missed. Look at me this way. They always say we don't have family feelings. I hate proving them right. When I lived with the white people in Charleston, I used to cry out loud for my Mammy just so they wouldn't think I didn't care that I was torn away and stole. I wanted them to know I felt something. And I did feel something. Just not something for her. My cry was a lie.

I liked R. right from the first. He was good-looking and tender almost and he was funny in a biting way. And he could always see how strange life was, how it was what you loved that bit you, how it was the thing you lost and scrambled to find that killed you, how you were always doing the almost exact opposite of what you needed to do to be happy. He could laugh at the way life was folded, almost exactly on top of itself and upside down. He was, he is, a deeply and easily amused man who didn't think life meant anything, who wasn't afraid of G.o.d, or beholden to G.o.d, or grateful to G.o.d, or mad at G.o.d. He didn't seem to think at all on G.o.d and consequently didn't mind that G.o.d didn't think on him.