Free The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall Page B

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 colored—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 nigger girls get fat. Either way, only their own man wants them.
    R. loves the old ways of Savannah and Charleston and N'awlins; 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.

42
    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.
    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 asserted 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,