Free The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall Page A

even remember who wrote it? Does it matter? None of them really write, so somebody said it to somebody who wrote it down. Then they send it to me. They don't want me. I'm not welcome. They say, "She still here." Other, they mean. "Mammy gone. Ain't no reason for you to come here now."
    I know that; I got to laugh. Yeah. Now. Whoa. Garlic. Garlic doing what Garlic do, protect the place. I see it. If Other find me there, Other may fall in hate with the place. She may realize 'bout R. and me. May remember something about Lady and me. My slave fear falls in beside me. That old fear that should be getting old, turning brown and be easy to blow into the wind, is ever green like the earth is ever red. Garlic's scared, I'm scared, that old fear that what we love might be sold: Mamas, Daddys, children ... the place ... a dress ... anything we love.
    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-shell ring, fingertips of dirt on the hem of a dress. It happened so much, maybe now things turn into people. The house, Tata—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 his sacred 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.

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    R. 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 Union—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, Mississippi—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 Assisi 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
Othello.
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