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 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.