I wanted to yowl. But my mouth didn't open.

After what seemed like a long while, after it seemed I could never get up from that place, it seemed like I had to get out right then. Get out or be pulled into the grave. Like the angel of death had come and might confuse us. I arose from her bed and smoothe away my presence with my hands.

Across the room from the bed, facing the window, was a high-back chair.

She had seen the avenue of trees leading up to Cotton Farm from that window. I slumped into the chair and watched the road as Mammy had watched. Only I didn't know who I was watching for.

I was just there a little while before I could no longer bear the silence or the pain; I willed myself to doze. I don't believe I had been out for two minutes when the door opened.

Other didn't see me. The chair back hid me. I couldn't see her either. But I heard. First she sniffled and cried. Then she whined. She lay her head on Mammy's chest and told Mammy her troubles, like Mammy cared. Like she was telling her to fetch a shawl. She didn't see me at all. Not Other.

Maybe I slumped down low in the chair because I knew she would come.

Maybe I sought to hide myself so she might be revealed. Everyone at Twelve Slaves Strong as Trees knew the story of how Other threw herself and some kind of vase at Dreamy Gentleman and of how R. heard it because he was Lying down on a couch unseen. It was the one story he told me about her. And I told it to the community. Strange how on the pillow you get them to tell you-not the things you want to hear, but the things that may kill you. It was on the pillow he told me his soldiering tales.

I cleared my throat, paused a moment before rising-she could wait to see who had heard-then I rose. I stand a good three or four inches taller than she does. But her waist is smaller. Mammy used to tell me that. There are things of mine that she has taken. I could not let this hour, this visit be one of them.

She was scared, and for the first time in my life I saw her scared without her angry.

I knew if I said boo, she'd run out the room.

So I said, "Boo." Or I said, "My mother and I want to be alone, ma'am. Captain R. sends his condolences, sho do. He sent some fruit for you. Sent some for me and all the folks here too." Other ran out the room, crying.

I stepped to the door, calling softly, "Ma'am? What must I do to comfort you?"

Nowadays, Miss Priss and her mother, Garlic's family, live in the old overseer's house. The house where Lady caught some fever, smallpox or scarlet, and died. Someone has ludicrously trained rosebushes to grow up the side of this slap-dash wooden structure. Most nights Garlic sleeps in Planter's old room and leaves his bed in the overseer's house empty. He's put my bags in the trellised shack; I'm to sleep in his empty bed. Before I came down from the old house, I took a bottle from Other's dining room sideboard. I hope no one misses it tonight. I help myself to a long swig.

I walk out on the porch, hoping it will help me catch my breath.

There's no gas to illuminate the dark out here, only oil lamps and bee's-wax flame. It makes for a different color of night. The stars are brighter. It's hard to see to write.

There are so many things of Other's I have wanted. Things, then people. People more than things-but nothing she has ever had, no emerald, not R." have I ever wanted as much as I wanted her love for Mammy. As the sun sets, it don't hurt near as much that Mammy didn't love me as it hurts that I didn't love Mammy.

Once upon a time I loved my mother. But that love was frail and untended; I let that love die. No, it wasn't like that, like a plant in a pot deprived of water. Truth is that love got some sort of sickness that moved so quick and there was no doctor to tend the patient and my love just died. I had no idea in the world how to stop that death from coming once it started, and started coming on quick. It was like the smallpox moving through the house, leaving scars and death, and you're scared to see it coming. And you never forget it came. Just like the first time you see a dead body, you know one day death's coming for you too. The first time you stop loving somebody, you learn all love ends. And loving somebody is just the graceful practice of patience before the love dies.

I know exactly where my love for Mammy is buried. Like an unembalmed beast left decaying in the yard of my mind, it stinks the place right up to high heaven. Is there a low heaven? Can I drift there and stay close to her?

It hurts not to love her. And it hurt more when I didn't -I still don't-believe she ever loved me. I close my eyes after writing that, after making that witness, and I wince in a breath. God damn her soul!

And it's less a curse than a fear. What do God do with folk who won't see the beauty He put in all creation? What do He do when He tired of hearing the angels weeping? I know the angels weep every time a dusky Mama is blind to the beauty of her darky child, her ebony jewel, and hungers only for the rosebud mouth to cling to the plum moon of her breast.

Don't I understand why Miss Priss killed Mealy Mouth? Don't I remember Garlic's wife with Mealy Mouth and Dreamy Gentleman's Harvard-going brat at her breast? Miss Priss lost two brothers to that woman. It's all so mixed up. I take a sip more-or is it more than a sip-from Other's brandy bottle, and my memories are like fish in a bowl swimming one way and then another, detached, insignificant, but still I turn back to look, remember, watch, mesmerized as the memories glide past.

R. didn't have too many bedroom memories of Other to tell, to hold back. But sometime during the afternoon that Georgia entered the war, he felt her breath on his face, and that breath left its imprint on his eye. Other never knew, didn't guess, I was the one first spoke her name to him. To get her out of my head, I put her in his. That's not what I intended to do, but I did something, and that's what happened. I was the one told him 'bout her.

I'm trying to remember about that time and get it straight. R. had gone to the picnic barbecue at Twelve Slaves Strong as Trees, gone to do a little business, he told me. I believe now he went there to see her. Other had gone in the hopes of getting Dreamy Gentleman to ask for her hand in marriage. But that was not to be, and everybody but Other had seen it a long time coming.

Dreamy Gentleman had made up his mind to marry his cousin Mealy Mouth, a flat-chested slip of a girl who would never ask more from marriage than family. She didn't have the first idea about passion between a man and a woman, but she possessed a fiery loyalty to family, particularly to her brothers, that attracted Dreamy Gentleman profoundly. He saw luscious possibilities in that loyalty. And he saw a fine line of children springing from his loins (which he coveted and hoped he deserved), golden children that would resemble his beautiful cousin, resemble all his cousins, for they greatly resembled each other.

Dreamy Gentleman was a particular friend of Mealy Mouth's brother (not the young one Other would marry; an older brother nobody really talked about). This brother played Cupid for Mealy Mouth and Dreamy Gentleman; Dreamy Gentleman could not but be slain by Mealy Mouth's brother's golden arrow. Mealy Mouth was grateful to her brother for forming the attachment.

If Other could see how tenderly Dreamy Gentleman valued loyalty and silence and how roughly he disdained feminine hunger and passion, she would not have made the drive to Twelve Slaves Strong as Trees. She would have known that she was not and had never been a featured player in the theater of his life. No wife would be.

But she was blind to all that. Other knew only every man she knew would give his life to be the object of her desire.

There had been someone Dreamy Gentleman loved, but not someone he could marry or that any of us could talk about. Miss Priss had a brother who worked for Mealy Mouth's Mama and Papa, and that brother was dead. They never feared Miss Priss after that; after her brother whipped up dead, Miss Priss went kind of simple. She seemed to want to make it all up to the family, the family, she said, over and over again, "what had been betrayed." Mealy Mouth's family thought she was talking about them. They continued to believe Miss Priss understood that a trusted family servant (even your brother) whispering a family secret (even in passion) was peculiar treachery. Garlic, who mourned his son, knew what his daughter meant. And knowing that Miss Priss possessed a keen and labyrinthine intelligence, Garlic seemed willing to let her balance the scales. He did very little to make amends. He just was.

But Miss Priss was there both times Mealy Mouth gave birth, the time she died, and the time she almost died. Miss Priss scares me. I don't think there's anything simple about her. So later, when they were all together during the war, when I lived at Beauty's and they were living at Other's Aunt Pattypit's, and Miss Priss told me how Other "throwed herself" at Dreamy Gentleman and how R. saw, I didn't tell her different. She thought R. was seeing her for the first time that day; she thought what Other thought. But he was only meeting her for the first time. He saw her first in his conversation with me.

It was me who told R. about Other. Even before they met, I made him see her. I didn't want to lose him, but I wanted someone who loved her to love me more than her. I made the introduction in fear with trembling. I didn't believe anybody who knew us both could love me more, but I hoped for it, and I had to know. I didn't trust Miss Priss enough to tell her how it really was then, and I don't trust her enough now, but I remember.

I fed R. from Mammy's store of how wonderful Other was-and there is something wonderful about her and it was exactly this: she has the vitality, the vigor, and the pragmatism of a slave, and into this water you stir as much refinement as you can pour without leaving any grains of sugar at the bottom of the glass. She was a slave in a white woman's body, and that's a sweet drink of cold water. In more ways than one, she thought and didn't think I was her sister. Just like in the Bible, I played Mary to her Martha, but many days it feels that it is I who have chosen the lesser part. Truth to tell, it's the lesser part what chose me. When it comes right down to it, I am Lady's child and she is Mammy's.

My mother, Lady, lost her man, Feleepe, at fifteen. When her family refused to accept him as a suitor, he ran off to some port city and was killed in a duel. Other's mother, Mammy, lived with her man all of her life, taking no public part, giving no private corner. Lady lay with Planter only the nights that were needed to bring babies. The girls who still walk this earth with me, and the boys who lay sleeping in the graveyard. Planter slept with Mammy in pleasure all their lives. In truth of body, I was the passion fruit, and Other was the bloom of civil rape. In truth of soul, Other was raised in the humidity of desire sucking boldly at Mammy's breast, and I was raised in the cool restraint of Lady's boudoir, the place to which you retreat with dignity, a place of private sorrows and private consolations, the touch of Lady's soft hand lavished on my hapless head. So Other was a child of pleasure and I a child of cold chastity, willing to be bred.

Garlic dug the grave. We had our service early in the morning, Garlic, his wife, Miss Priss, and me. Just dawn. The time of day when even servants rest. Maybe. I wanted an hour she had been at rest on earth, and I couldn't find one. Only in the lazy drag of her feet, the slow trifling ramble on any one of so many errands, did she save herself just a little from work-hard-work-long exertion, a slave's exertion.

There are two cemeteries on the place. Out back of where the cabins used to be, over a mile from the house, there is a slave cemetery. A concentration of round fieldstones (some still in stacks) and branches lashed together to create crude crosses mark for still blinking eyes the territory of the enslaved dead. It helps to squint. The ground is soft here, damp. Some suspect an underground spring. A blanket of wild grass and wild flowers covers this ground most of the year, protecting, concealing.

Closer to the house-you can see it from the porch-is the family burial ground: a rising mound of red earth beneath a tall, limb-spreading tree. In this mound are carved stones of pink Etowah marble. Pink stones, head and feet, red earth, green tree, sprigs, and odd blades of grass. Nothing much could grow in that shade. Nothing grows in this shade but names and dates and ghosts. A low wall of flat stones piled one on top of the other, a slave wall, hedges the ghost in, hedges the visitors out.