Free The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall

didn't fit anymore. It popped off; he was laughing. "Cried crocodile tears."
    "I'm sure you did. And now?"
    "And now I'm on my way to Tennessee."
    "Tennessee?"
    "I'm no farmer."
    "They have something more than farms in Tennessee?"
    "Horses."
    "Ain't that Virginia, or Kentucky?"
    "Tennessee. I've got some family living on a plantation just outside of Nashville. Belle Meade. They breed fine horses there. They could use a man like me."
    Pieces of our world were just spinning off. Ever since Emancipation. Big and little pieces. Before we never went anywhere.
    "Back when you were a young gal, you remember me from then?"
    "I was never young."
    "Little, then."
    "Of course."
    "When I was little, I got whipped for you."
    "I don't remember that."
    "You didn't get whipped."
    "How I get you in trouble?"
    "Trouble was there; you didn't get me in it. I let you ride my horse. You were ten or eleven. I was thirteen or fourteen. Planter came down and saw you legs spread around that animal, saw it was my horse you was on, and whipped up some pain on me."
    "I remember riding. You never looked at me after that."
    "I'd like to take you riding again."
    "I'd like that too."
    "Would he mind it? Would it matter if he did?"
    "No and yes."
    "No and yes?"
    "He would mind ... if he bothered to notice."
    "But if a white man..."
    "Or some white man might mind for him. Someone who thinks Cap'n still owns you."
    And it be worse than a beating Jeems would catch. They're hanging black men all through the trees. Strange fruit grow in the Southern night. It's the boil on the body of Reconstruction, whites killing blacks. They didn't kill us as often, leastways not directly, when they owned us. All I will remember about Jeems is he caught a beating. There have been so many more pictures of Jeems in my head. Off to the side of those tall, red, laughing boys (who did the Grand Tour not of Europe but of the Southern universities), a lithe, taller man, observant, graceful Jeems. So many pictures, if in most, he, like me, was way off to the side in my mind's memory. But all those memory pictures started vanishing with a blow to my head, a blow of knowledge. He'd caught a beating for me, and I had never even known.
    He asked me how I was keeping. He told me he was sad for me about my Mama. His pity was too much. I told him not to be. I wanted to be asking him not to leave if he pitied me so much, but my old habit of not asking for what I won't get is strong. I was angry he was leaving, and jealous that he could imagine escaping the world we knew. I shook my head and told him the truth—because I thought it would hurt him. I told him I hadn't known my mother well and she didn't know me.
    I had intended to silence him, but instead my candor loosened his mouth. He too had a tale to tell about mothers, much to my surprise.
    "I never knew, I don't know who my Mama is. They bought me when I was a baby. Some idea Miz had to raise me with the Twins, so I could be their slave but not have 'niggerish' ways. Almost everything best about me is niggerish ways. But that's my defiance, and my defiance is pure Miz. I'm pure African and I got a mulatto mind. That's me. Listen here, gal. Think on this. I 'member Miz always said to the boys she didn't want them marryin' Lady's daughters, not any of 'em. She said, 'You can't divide Lady from Mammy.' Nobody knew what she mean, but I say, if it's true you can't divide Mammy from Lady, maybe you can't divide Lady from Mammy."
    Now what that supposed to mean? I wanted to ride back with Jeems to Cotton Farm, to the answers those acres might provide, to a little more time with him. But he's only stopping back home before going on to Tennessee, straightaway. He's not stopping back through Atlanta, and I'm not returning home. I sent Garlic his cake in the mail.

40
    Where did I think I was going? Who did I think I was going to? I got a letter from the plantation—that's what it is really, not a cotton farm—in response to mine. Can I