I crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a ship called the Baltic. The crossing took seventeen days. My hate of seawater did not emerge until I was upon it for at least three or four. It popped up the way one of the sailors said that icebergs do. Out of the fish-rich darkness emerges this white, killing thing. Pointing straight up to the sky. A ship is like a cotton farm. Everyone has his place. There are the officers and the sailors. From the officers' uniforms dangle brass buttons that sparkle like stars against the blue, the way soldiers' buttons do.
When I first saw R. in his soldier's uniform, I wondered who he had got it off, what dead boy or man. Whose skin did he inherit? Or is my skin the only skin that has been inherited in this—dare I say it—family?
It was during the burning of Atlanta; it was late in the war.
Or did he just buy that uniform in a store? I know you don't buy them in a store. Did he have it made up, in preparation? When did he know, when did he become a soldier in the South? A Confederate officer willing to die, to keep me—different from the sailors on the ship. The sailors who live in the hole and have more work and less water and no brass buttons, the difference between them and me—words on paper. I had the softer labor.
Words on paper, a bill of sale written out at the slave market in Charleston, a name and a price. The girls who sell themselves at Beauty's are saved the pain of words on paper; their prices disappear, spoken and forgotten in the air. The most free slaves are the ones who cannot read or write.
Later, I read about the Baltic. It carried supplies for the relief of Fort Sumter. I guess the Congressman had read about it too. Read and remembered.