Strain has the same effect as a draught of laudanum. It excites and numbs at the same time. The shate shate shate of the wheels under you quiets the spirit, the monotony of sound quiets the soul, and the ever-changing scenery occupies the mind simply. Nothing remains in view long enough to hold on to. Another way of sleepwalking with your eyes wide open.

The Congressman doesn't dance attendance on me, but he makes his presence known. He brings an extra pillow, a gla.s.s of water, a cup of coffee. This morning when he offered the coffee, he allowed his fingers to brush over mine. It was the first time we had touched since we danced.

"Perhaps you'll take me dancing while we are in the Capital City," I venture.

"I don't think my fiancee would like that."

"I'm not sure that I like that you have a fiancee."

The Congressman laughed at that, big guffaws.

"Why are you laughing? Was she the gap-too the girl you danced with after you danced with me, the last time we danced?"

"Yes."

"Had you asked her then?"

"No, then I was thinking of asking you."

I blushed; my cheeks, my breast turned scarlet. "You hoped I'd marry you?"

"Yes. Given the choice between being my wife or his mistress, I thought you might choosea"wife."

"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 pa.s.s you by so quickly, until you realize that things are not pa.s.sing you by; you are pa.s.sing by the things, the trees, the ponds, the people. The people don't pa.s.s you by; you pa.s.s 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 b.u.t.terfly, but I have seen the worm and the b.u.t.terfly, so I don't have to imagine. Does the worm die and the b.u.t.terfly 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 wh.o.r.ehouse 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 youa"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.

183 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 pa.s.sion is so powerful because I have sh.o.r.ed 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 withholda"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 pa.s.sion 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 unreala"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 wh.o.r.ehouse. He did not disappoint me. Lord, he did not disappoint me at all.

186.

T H E W I N D D O N E G O N E.

,vhave 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 s.e.x 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 187ever known. If there is anything better than being a free n.i.g.g.e.r on Sat.u.r.day night, it's being a free Negro on Sunday morning; in his sister's bed I have my cake and eat it too.

We strolled out and about in the neigborhood later, easily arm and arm. No one much knows me up here. Many bob their heads, as if to say what a handsome couple. This is a new experience for me, but it is a familiar one for him. I don't have to ask him to know that he has never in his life touched a white woman, would not dream of kissing one, and that if he did dream of it, it would be an act of defiance, not of desire. It is less comfort, much less comfort, to realize he has an eye for all the chocolate, and the caramel, and the coffee-colored beauties on these streets, sashaying out to enjoy their freedom. He likes to look at pretty women; he allows himself the luxury of resting his eyes on their faces. I let my elbow find its way into his ribs.

"G.o.d wouldn't a made women so beautiful if He didn't want men to take a moment to enjoy the beauty He created! Lord knows you women don't care enough about your own appearance to be peeking in any mirrors."

I laugh at the silliness he wraps around some of his sharper truths. I am the only dark woman R. notices. I should find comfort in that fact but ita"discomfits me.

Many folks recognize the Congressman, men in overalls, men in hats; he treats all alike and bows to them slightly. If there's a baby in arms, he threatens to kiss it, then shakes his head, walking forward and announcing, "Too much innocence for me to taint."

R. is a rich man and perhaps a powerful one. My Congressman is a famous man and perhaps a powerful one. I'm beginning to discern the differences and how they might matter to me.

Xasks me about my sister, Other. I have nothing more to say. I am bored with that story. Today is the day I go to see the doctor. There is no one else for him. The girl I saw dancing with him so long ago is an old friend of his family he might have married had he not met me.

189Sdoctor, one of the first colored doctors in the country, had not very much to saya"except he's seen my b.u.t.terfly before and with it the aches in the bonea"but there are other things I do not feel and that make him hopeful. He says the tired comes and goes. He says sometimes people die. He says I'm lucky I didn't have a baby, because sometimes that makes it worse.

Through this all he was more reserved than he had been before. Quite a bit more reserved. In fact, it took a few days for me to get the appointment. Finally, after the examination, when I was dressed and about to leave, he cleared his throat and said what I believe he had been trying to say all the while.

"Madam, when I first met you I was impressed by your deportment." (I would rather he had said intelligence and simple grace.) "You were in a difficult position, but you handled yourself with modesty. (I would rather he had modified the modesty perhaps by adding simplicity, humble modesty.) "All eyes could see that you were in the best and the worst sense of the word married. But you bore the yoke with..." (Did he call it grace?) "When you married, we were happy for you. Every Negro man who had a mother forced or cajoled by the master raised a cup to your victory. But now you come to town with no husband, only an intent on sullying the good name of one of the great dark men in the Capital City. I can't but join my fellow citizens in disapproving."

"I don't think you know anything of my situation."

"I can smell him on you."

It was the most vulgar sentence I had ever had spat at me. I know what he meant. I had washed the linen at Beauty's. Being a doctor is another kind of washing of the bedsheets.

"He will never be elected again if he keeps up with you. Voting Negroes won't vote for a man living with another man's wife." I tried to interrupt him, but he wouldn't be stopped. "Whoever you think you are, in the polite society of Negro teachers and preachers and lawyers and doctors, you will always be the Confederate's concubine." He was on a roll. "You have a greater chance of being accepted among old white families than new colored ones." And he kept on going. "We're a prim and proper lot."

I hadn't thought of this. I hadn't thought of very much at all. My business in Washington is complete. I should return by the first train to Atlanta. It would be the sensible thing to do, and I am a sensible woman. No lady in any novel I know makes the kind of mistakes in books that I make in life. In all the literature I know, only one book comes close to what I feel. This is Great Expectations. Pip has a guilty family. Almost guiltier than mine. What is owed the rescuer? Do we always fall in love with those who rescue us? Didn't I know Miss Havisham in calico? What don't Estella and Other have in common? How easily Pip accepted his good fortune. I envy white boys that most of alla"their certainty that they're going to be or get lucky. It occurs to them to live with great expectations. It occurs to them to do what they want and not worry about it. It occurs to R. to do that all the time. It doesn't occur to me at all. It occurs to me to run back to Atlanta.

R. has moved back into Other's house. Her children are there, and they need him. There's the grand staircase he once carried her upa"and too many rooms to count.

This is where we huddled together when Precious died.

He sends a card *round to my house, and I arrive at the appointed hour for my visit. We make love. He traces the b.u.t.terfly on my cheek. And he asks if I am going to be all right. I tell him yesa"and I tell him that I'm leaving him in the morning. In the morning, I'm leaving him. I've just made up my mind to do it. When I said it, I was letting him know how unhappy I am. Now I'm hearing myself. I'm leaving in the morning.

"I gave you my name," R. says.

"I never told you mine," I reply.

Mammy never rode the train. I've got Lady's emerald ear bobs in my purse. I took them from Other's jewelry box. Some folks say emeralds are higher than peri dots because there are more peri dots in the world. It's what's scarce is high. Some folks say it's because emerald got a prettier color. I say it's because the rich folks found emeralds first and have more of them, so they say the peridot be just a little better than green-colored gla.s.s to give higher value to what they have a higher number of. Like white blood. But a man made the green-colored gla.s.s and G.o.d made the emerald and the peridot, and I can't help knowing the peridot is the pretty color of gra.s.s in the fall, the color of living things that survive the thirst of late summer when there's so much gold in the green. I see the peridot and the emerald are the same beautiful thing, and green gla.s.s is something altogether different.

I'm riding on the train up to Washington, alone. I don't send word ahead. No. All I have taken out of his house are her things. I take her things and leave her-him. This is the best I can do with this algebra of our existence. She gets him, and I get her things. Everything he bought me I left behind, every pair of bloomers, every barrette, the peridot ear bobs the wedding ring, everything. I cannot go to my Congressman in R."s things.

I went up to her room. I opened the closet: a sea of green, velvet, satin, silk; a gown or two in black; a blue day costume; hats. It was said around Atlanta that she liked green best because it is the color of money. But I who knew her from the first day either of us knew anything, knew that she loved green before she even knew what money was.

You don't see paper money on a cotton farm. You don't even see paper money on what it was and I have not wished to claim, a great Georgia plantation. On a place like that, in the place we lived together, half-sisters separated by a river of notions: notions of Negroes and notions of chilvary, notions of race and place, notions of custom and rage; in the country we inhabited in our childhood, you measured wealth in red earth and black men. There was nothing green in it.

Green were the leaves, green was the gra.s.s, green the gra.s.shoppers, green all the insignificant pretty things, all the moving tokens of living, and that's why Other loved green, because she was, or saw herself to be, an insignificant pretty living thing. She didn't wear it because of the money or because it matched her eyes. She wasn't, in fact, vain. She knew I was the prettier one. Knew it right off and didn't let it worry her.

She wasn't pretty, but she had the capacity to distract men from noticing that. And now that my looks are vanishing with the years, I must borrow that from my sister; I must learn to make men not notice that I am not beautiful. Her dresses are a fine beginning. I will go to my Congressman in my sister's clothes.

I packed in her trunks. I look at my reflection in the window and it's a blurry thing, but I see me as I have never been before. I wear green well. For somehow, too, green is Daddy's Ireland.

Garlic told me the story. He got it from Mammy, who had got it from Planter. Planter ran out of Ireland with the law on his tail, wanted for a murder he had committed. And thieving he had thieved. He couldn't see other people have everything when his family had nothing. And when things were too hot in that country, he quit it. That was her father and that was mine.

She was like him in that she killed. Miss Priss told me that story. She, Other, and Mealy Mouth killed the Union soldier, robbed his dead body, and dragged him off in their chemises, all the while making light conversation with the family out the window. I come from a strong people. And I am like him in my willingness to leave my world to find a better one. It is a sister and a family I leave behind, not Other, not some thing.

Once in Georgia I had a sister who loved my mother dearly; she took care of Mama all her life, better care of her than I took. I hated her and buried her, and now I forgive her. Once in Georgia I had a mother I could not find my way to loving. I'm grateful that Other found a way and kept the path clean and brightly used. She made exquisite use of my mother's love.

And now it's my turn to make good use of her mother's love. Lady loved her black man in the bright light of day. If he will have me, I will love Adam, I will love my Congressman that way.

R. writes me letters it would bore me to return. He is someone else's dream. Whose dream I'm not sure. I suppose Beauty's. Beauty stretched the scope of her imagination to see him, to want him. She didn't like men, but she loved him. That's tribute. Other loved him when she had nothing else to love. It was a scrawny little pathetic love, and he wouldn't have it. And me, I loved him because he was the prize, and I wanted the prize to feel and know, taste and see that I could win it, but it was his power I craved, not him.

I tell him, I have been sleeping in my sister's bed. I don't want that anymore.

He tells me, I saw you before I ever saw her, wanted you before her.

But then you chose her because you could and she reminded you of me. She was your daylight version of me. You betrayed me and I betrayed her on so many succulent occasions, too many succulent occasions. But I no longer have a taste for that meat. It's too rich for me. I want something simple, like a cold joint of ham, a slice of cornbread, and a big gla.s.s of b.u.t.termilk. I want to love a stranger who knows no one I know. You have been a father to me, and now that you look the part, I don't want you. His eyes well up. I won't give you a divorce. I'll live in sin. Proudly. You taught me that.

"What is your name," he asks me.

"Cynara," I say, walking out his door.

(am traveling unescorted. I feel nauseous. There are rascals of every hue on this train. Whatever remained of my good name will be gone by the time we reach Washington. Why doesn't anyone a.s.sume that a woman on her own wants to be?

The Congressman doesn't know I'm coming. The election is fast upon him; he doesn't need anything more to worry him. He can't imagine I will come.

R. imagined I would go. He sent a note *round to my house. I call it my house because he gave it to me, because my name is on the deed, and because, as Beauty says and it's ugly to admit, I earned it.

R. wrote to say that if I was going to Washington, I could stay at "the house." He doesn't say my house, and he doesn't say ours. His kindness makes me cry. I am touched that he knew, could figure out, what I would do; his kindness makes me cry, but I can't accept it anymore.

Sugh I had money, they wouldn't rent a hotel room to an unaccompanied woman. I hired a driver to take me to my Congressman's sister's house. When she opened the door she remembered me.

She is a ball tonight at the university. All the great Negro leaders of the city will be present. The election has come and gone. My Congressman will be Congressman no more when they swear in the new House. His sister has invited me to go with her party to the ball. I have things to tell him. I hope I can find the words.

We danced tonight. But before we danced I made preparations.

I had the slim gap-too the girl, Corinne, over for tea. suspected three or four things about her, one or two of them very important to me. Her flat chest and narrow hips reminded me of Mealy Mouth, only more. It was not easy issues I sidled up to, but I sidled up under the guise of sharing the story of a girl cousin who was married but 199rocked an empty cradle. She never swelled. The girl shrugged.

Her teeth were pretty, really, little pearls with a tiny little part in the middle of her smile. She was unashamed; things were as G.o.d intended them. If she was to live alone, well, she wasn't alone; she was with her parents. And she had the children in the settlement houses. There was important work to do and she was doing it. She knew how much the Negro population had increased since the end of the war. How many more hungry stomachs and hungry minds. How little helpful political currency remained. "Odd," she said, making a delicate joke to change the subject, "my female trouble is that I have no female trouble."

She took the bitter with the sweet and swallowed them both whole. "The only man who should marry me is a widower with five children who need someone to raise them. He would be lucky to get me."

"What about the Congressman?"

"He wants a family. He kept talking to me about babies, and that's when I pulled away."

"You love who you love," I say.

"You're blessed with whatever you're blessed with."

"Wherever it comes from."

"We're not in very different boats, are we?"

"You could not be more wrong," I say. Of a sudden I am frozen. After all these years she could not be more wrong.

If I find a way to offer my gift, will she find a way to accept?

pressed crushed flowers into the hem of my dress and into its creases. Scent rises in waves from my garment as I move. I tell him that he must marry the gap-too the girl. He laughs. We dance more. He pulls me deeper into the dance; we swirl, and I am drunk on the power that is flowing out of his body back into our country, our America. I look around me at these new Negroes, this talented tenth, this first harvest, the brightest minds, the sustained souls, the ones so beautiful they have received some advantage, and so strong they need not what they did not receive. Folks whose fathers were named Fearless and were freed because their master was afraid to own them. The ones who could intimidate from shackles. These beautiful ones. They are as close to G.o.ds as we have seen walk the earth. I dance and I see them dance in the darkening night as clouds roll in, covering the stars that shine upon the ones who survived the culling-out of the middle pa.s.sage, and the mental shackles of slavery; the group that rose with the first imperfect freedoms to this city, to the Capital, this group of Negroes shining brightly as theira"as oura"flame burns down as our time pa.s.ses.

This short night they call Reconstruction is ending. We dance in our twilight, and I know it. It is a secret greater than the secret I carry. Once in north Alabama rose a brilliant black man who no one gave a chance at all, rose and rode to Washington to take his place in the Capital City, a man who stole a woman from the oldest, richest family in the Confederacy. I saw that man. I saw him in the company of the nation's finest men, and I saw him stand toe to toe, and he was taller. But he is leaving the District of Columbia soon, and I don't know how long I will be around. I get too tired to remember. We swirl, the old fiddle sings us tunes, and when he pulls me closest, I tell him he must marry the girl and why. This is our Gotterdammerung. This is the twilight and we are the G.o.ds.

SCongressman married the doctor's daughter; that's what the town said. The girl who attended New England Female Medical College. In a little African Methodist *:1

I sold Lady's ear bobs and bought a little house out by the water in Maryland. Its weather-darkened bricks are from before the birth of our nation; the woods that sur round my place are older still. The Frederick Dougla.s.ses are talking about buying some nearby property and building a home. When the time comes, I think I will be ready for neighbors. If and when the Dougla.s.ses come, they want to encourage others to migrate with them. It's starting to be hard times for Negroes in the city, and it's always been hard times for Negroes in the country. It's easier to live where fewer dreams are buried.

ev son has been born to the Congressman, a legitimate heir. A beautiful, beautiful boy. He came into the world so pale, his mother fretted for days over his little Moses crib, praying for a little dark to come in. There were good signs from the start, a bit of brown ness *round his cuticles and the tips of his ears, but like many lightskinned babies his eyes are a greeny-gray. I am to be the G.o.dmother. They named him Cyrus after me. I took him back to an Episcopal church to be baptized; I couldn't wait for the Baptist immersion. If anything happens to my G.o.dchild, I want him to go straight up to heaven and wait for his father and mother. I want no doubts at all.

ah, my goodness. He is here. I call him Moses. I'm keeping Cyrus for his Poppa and Mama today. I tell him the story of Moses. I hold him above my head and I tell him about the mother making the cradle and setting it to float in the bulrushes. I tell him about the woman who put him in the cradle and the woman who found him. Some folks say she was the same woman, some folks say she was not. I know both women loved the baby. I am not so very well now. I think about the old days some now, and for the very first time I understand something about Mealy Mouth. The very best days are the days on which babies come. I'm so tired, I forgive her for what she had done to Miss Priss's brother, beat until he bled to death because something he said about a time he had had with Dreamy Gentleman. And I forgive Miss Priss for what she done to Mealy Mouth. And what that done to Other. And what that done to me. The very best days are the days the baby comes.

j is for you, my darling, emperor of the Congress of my heart. For you, Adam Conyers. Congressman Adam Conyers of Alabama, self-educated trained to the bar. I had intended to get a job on the new Negro newspaper. I had intended to write about the ladies and the parties they gave and the dresses they wore. I had intended to make you and him proud of me. All my life I saw the tangles that stood between me and lovea"until you. When I saw you, I refused to see the tangles, and I stubbed my toe, got swoll up and burst, and now it looks as if I'm going to ele.