Angs are not easy for my Congressman. There are Negroes in the Congress now and one or two in governors' mansions, but the tide is turning. R. doubts my Congressman will be re-elected. I fear he will lose his seat at my table as well as his seat in the Congress. If R. has no use for him, he'll find no place for him. It would be beyond the breadth of R.’s imagination or the length of his eyes to see our friendship. To give the devil his due, if R. saw our friendship he might stir a breath to protect it. He is not a man lacking in generosity. But you can't protect what you don't see. The Congressman will lose our house with his seat.

I didn't read the papers till I came to this city. I have been a farm girl even when I was a farm girl living in town. All I knew were the people on our place, the land, the sky above, the crop, and dreams printed on paper and bound in leather covers. Here the dreams walk and talk, eat and spit. The world comes to me. Comes to my table for dinner, invites me to tea, sits by my pot while I drink my morning coffee. I who didn't know till days after the war had begun or until days after the war ended. Now I sit in the shadows of those making the news of the day.

Reconstruction has been under attack from the moment it was born. The Klan is on the rise and increases in its violence. No one knows how long we coloreds will keep the vote. The Freed Men's Bureau is overrun with people who can't read or write, who don't know how old they are or where they were born, but are looking for somebody-a wife, a mother-whose name they cannot spell, whose age they do not know, whose state of residence they do not know. These are the people I lend money to. I know the time and day I was born. Mammy made Lady write it down.

Lady told me that. When I traced her neat script with my finger, she quickly tripped along, "Your mother worried me from the moment you came, to get that inscribed in the Bible." Mammy wanted the day and the exact time. "I told her," Lady said, "I thought the day would do, but Mammy wanted the time, and we don't own the exact time anywhere here on this plantation." I am twenty-nine years old. He is forty-six. I have no words to tell him that I am not traveling with him to London. I have lived under his roof almost half my life, and the only other people who have provided me a roof are dead. I will go to London with him.

Tonight when he lies beside me I will reach for him before he reaches for me. I have half my life before me, and I cannot afford for him to grow bored.

Strip to London has been postponed, indefinitely. We are leaving for Nashville! I will see Jeems. R. has some connections in that city. A maiden aunt with a bit of fortune and an awkward assemblage of hangers-on, threatening to bleed her whiter than she already is. Folk in Charleston think he should have gone as soon as possible, and the letter was delayed in the post, so he needs to leave already. He wants to travel light-without me, and this is a thing I would have accepted.

It is our usual way for me to stay at home, stay in our little enclosed world, but coming to Washington has changed that, and I have no taste for staying put. He tells me that people will know I'm his mistress-if I go.

I tell him, "Everybody I know knows I'm your mistress. It's only some of your friends who don't know. And can that matter to you now? Now, you think on marryin' me?”

“Precisely, my dear," he says. "I can't take you as mistress where I may one day want to take you as wife." I shake my head and insist. I would like to stamp my feet. I have no taste for being separated from him now. "Don't you have friends in the city with whom I can stay ? " He doesn't seem to be giving it a thought. So I say, quietly, "Some of the old folk from Cotton Farm live in Nashville. Write to the family at Belle Meade. Ask them to let me stay in one of the old cabins. All things can be arranged between gentlemen.”

“I am surprised you'd be willing to stay back in the cabins.”

“Why? Lincoln freed the slaves. What do I have to worry about?”

“It's been a long time since you were in the cabins." I let him pull me into his arms. "I'd do more than that r >s ror you.

He kisses my head and agrees to write the letter. "I feared you were succumbing to the charms of Washington," he says.

Hope of visiting Jeems makes me nostalgic for spacious, high-ceilinged rooms and lavish plaster embellishments. The outer doors, the front doors of Tata were six feet wide. When they were open, it was as if the side of the house had been taken down. We will take back this place, we will take back this place, a tree once grew where this dining room stands and will grow there again; we will take back this place, nature says as you move through the house; and it was Garlic who created the structure that said it.

Later, I take a nap and dream of Jeems.

Carriage ride to Belle Meade is not to be. Me be, we be, I am, we are sailing to London. We are sailing to London. I am and he is, the sail and the wind, and the old city. We are a whisper of wind seeking for London, a clean rag from the wash on a straight-up pole, pushing on to London. We are these new people who sail for pleasure. But the wind and the whisper and the rag are part of what I know, and the me in the other we, I am, fears. We are a sailed people. We sailed to America.

We taste the path of our abduction in our tears. It's as if the house is on fire and I've got to get out quick.

Hate or fear of "crossing the water" may be the only thing I have left of my mother's, my grandmother's. Surely, it's the only thing that I have that I know I have. Maybe I have something else and I don't know it. If the fear were truly mine, I could touch it more intimately, get into its crevices, or let it get into mine, and I would know it. This feeling hangs down low in me, a heavy lump of an unexplored thing, like a clod of brown-red mud giving off some old mother heat.

The old aunt died before we could pack for Nashville. I long for forest. I yearn for the trees and the horses of Jeems, the steam from their nostril sand the steam from their fresh dung. I miss the safe inland cities. Nashville, Atlanta. These cities with their front porches on the ocean, Washington, Savannah, Charleston, scare me, like a door left open on a dark night with robbers about.

But I am hungry for the city on the Thames. I think of the palaces, Hampton Court where Queen Elizabeth lived, I think of the Tower of London and all the things I read about in those Walter Scott novel sand those slow Jane Austen pages. The only one of those I ever loved at all was Mangeld Part. Fanny hated slavers. I think of all those ladies now because-why? Because-why? Because, having forgotten what I saw there, they are all I know of the world to which I am going.

Dusty pages. Mouse supper.

I laughed so hard at breakfast, my insides got tickled. I laughed so good, I was the giggle and I was drunk on it too. I laughed so hard this morning my stomach hurt from stretching and shaking. The deep belly laugh cures more than you know that ails you. I had forgotten that. It's been so long since I had one. The rumble and the jiggle of the thing does a woman more good than a poke. But the good strong belly laugh is harder to come by than a good stiff poke.

Debt Chauffeur, that's my name for him now, wants to marry me. He asked me down on bended knee, and I would have been honored-except he wants us to live in London, and he wants me to live white. I crowed at that. I laughed so hard, and not a tear came. He couldn't understand it. I don't often think on how white I look; it's always been a question of how colored I feel, and I feel plenty colored. He said that no one in London will know that I'm supposed to be colored. And I said I am colored, colored black, the way I talk, the way I cook, the way I do most everything, and he said but you don't have to be. She was "black" and she didn't seem it, and she was not that much lighter than you, and she was "black." At last that explained everything to him. I understood it near at once. It had never seemed before that he so little knew me. Always at least he knew the difference between her and me, and now he saw little difference, and the advantage was all to Other.

I tell him. Mammy is my mother. I think of her more as the days pass.

I can't pass away from her. He says she's the one asked me to do it. I don't believe him, and he hands me another letter. script was ornate but the words were crude. I didn't recognize the handwriting. Before I read the contents I guessed the fine script belonged to some Confederate widow, a general's wife or daughter, who owed a favor to Lady and repaid it to Mammy. But what I read Mammy would never have dictated to any friend of Lady's. I suspect she came to Atlanta, came to Atlanta and didn't visit me, came to Atlanta and got someone from the Freed Men's Bureau to do her writing. I can hear her saying, "Git it 'xact. I ain't here fo' no about." Syllable and sound, the words were Mammy's.

Dear Sur, You done already send one of mah chilrens back to me broke. Lak an itty bitty thang, a red robin, you done twist her soul lak da little neck and huah can't sang no mo'. She was mah Lamb, so I guess that how that goes.

Now you got mah chile. What was my vary own. Dat's a love child you got, Cinnamon. Skinny as stick, spicy and sweet. An eyes-wide-open-in-the-daylight child. She need a rang on her finger and some easy days, dat gal do. I had me the roof and the clothes, I watch huah Lady wear de jewels but Ah ain't ne'er cared nothing about dat. Ah done toted and tarried and twisted mah own few necks, but dis ain't about dat. Let mah child love you. And let Gawd love her too.

For what I done for you little Precious. Yo' chile dat died. Marry mah little gal. I am sincerely, Her Mammy Beneath the last two words Mammy had placed her mark, a cross in a circle.

cried enough to ride back to Africa on a slide of tears. "Mah little gal"-what I wouldn't give to hear her speak those words I see on the paper; what I would not give does not exist. I want to eat the paper.

I would give anything to hear her say "mah little gal." What am I writing? I would give everything to hear her say anything at all. I want Mama, I want my mother. I want Mammy. It's easy to want her, now that I know she wanted me. If I coulda wanted her when I didn't know she wanted me, she might be mine right now. She might be alive right now. Mammy never stood foot on London. Ah ain't goin' dere. I ain't goin' nowhere she ain't been. I'm staying here and looking for what's left of her.

gebt says all that's left of Mammy is me. He is polite enough to flinch as he says it. I ask him if he's imagining me fat and dark. He don't answer. He tells me about a dream Other used to have. A dream of hers. She was lost in a fog, running, looking for something, and she don't know what. Other never knew what she wanted, so she never had it even when she did. I ask him why he's still talking to me about her when she's buried in the ground. I say I know what I'm looking for. When I was a little girl I was looking for love. When they sold me off the place I was looking for safety. At Beauty's I was looking for propriety, and now, and now I have drunk from the pitcher of love, and the pitcher of safety, and the pitcher of propriety till I feel the water shaking in my ears. But thirst still burns. What I want now is what I always wanted and never knew-I want not to be exotic. I want to be the rule itself, not the exception that proves it. But I have no words to tell him that, and he has many feelings for me, but that is not one of them.

Later, I look at my reflection in the glass-and I try to see what he sees. I look for the colors. I see the blue veins in my breast. I see the dark honey shine of my skin, the plum color of my lips. I see the green of my eyes, and I see the full curve of my lips and the curl of my hair, and I _ know that it's not so very bad being a nigger-but you've got to be in the skin to know.

Am I still laughing? It is not in the pigment. of my skin that my Negressness lies. It is not the color of my skin. It is the color of my mind, and my mind is dark, dusky, like a beautiful night. And Other, my part-sister, had the dusky blood but not the mind, not the memory. There must be something you can do or not do. Maybe if the memories are not teased forth, they are lost; maybe if the dance is not danced, you forget the patterns. I cannot go to London and forget my color. I don't want to. Not anymore.

efhad never known him to be ignorant. But he is. He thinks like the others, the common tide. He thinks that the blackness is in the drop of blood, something of the body. I would have thought he knew enough women's bodies to know that that could not be true. And enough blacks and whites to know there is a difference. What did I suck in on Mammy's tit that made me black, and why did it not darken Other's berry? Was there some slight tinge, some darkening thing about Other?