I was invited to the home of Mr. Frederick Douglass today. I'm not sure if I should go. R.'s not back yet. It's been a while. I've heard almost nothing from him. Nothing literate—only what Beauty and some of the homefolk scribbled. It's like a code. A code I've got to break before I know anything. First deciphering the letters, then puzzling out how the words, contorted by spelling, read, then trying to decide what these words, put together as they are, mean. Letters from Cotton Farm, dashed across scraps of paper, make my eyes want to snap shut. Beauty's chicken scratches embalmed in stale clouds of her perfume ache my head, reminding me that she's with him and I ain't. Reminding me that she knew him before I did. Quiet as I might keep it, maybe I wouldn't care so much if she knows him after I know him—except that loving him is the only work I'm trained to do. I would cry if it wouldn't make my eyes red, if dabbing at them wouldn't etch little chicken scratch lines into my skin that say, "Death's coming and it's catching." That's what the lines on a lady's face spell, and every man can read it.
No chickens will walk across her face while she sleeps. She will remain in the garden of his mind, and in mine, an early summer rose, before a petal is dropped, almost sweet, light-scented. He will never see her grow old. Nothing more than that thickening of waist, a dropping and thinning of bosom that had already begun, and a slight thickening of her nose and reddening of her face. She will live forever, in some Charleston-in-late-summer-on-the-Battery garden of his mind, blooming forever, showered by sweet wine.
***
I don't drink. Not much. Lady slapped the first glass of wine right out of my hand. I was thirteen. She was fierce. "Do you want to look like Planter?" I had no idea in this world what she was talking about, but I was so tickled I almost wet myself. "His face gets redder and his nose gets thicker every drink he takes. It happens to the Irish, and it'll happen to you." Just like that she said it, then ran her fingers through my hair. It was the first time I had heard her speak aloud that I was Irish, that I was his. Always before it had been a known, unspoken thing. And the moment Lady spoke it, the truth seemed less true. I don't know why, and I wished it wasn't. But the moment she spoke it, my truth became less mine. As she ran her fingers through my hair, I could feel her pulling away from my body; I heard and felt the truth being snatched away from me. I didn't see anything, but she could see Planter in me. And every day it was easier to see more of him in me, because every day she was coming to see other things in me she didn't like. And the more she saw what she didn't like, the more she could see Planter in me.
She was deserting me in little minutes, with small gestures, a half-combed curl, an unproffered glass of milk, a cast-aside field flower. That was it. I felt like a favored doll that had been sat back on the shelf after years between the pillows and the covers, just because a big blue box with white satin ribbon had arrived one cake-day and a prettier doll with raven curls had been pulled from the tissue paper. What I really felt like was the weed I had lovingly pulled from the yard and presented to her, only to find it later cast aside, untreasured, desiccated. It's a thirst-provoking recognition, the sight of yourself abandoned. It's how I got the wine glass in my hand, and Lady slapped it out. And it wasn't the wine glass that got slapped out of my hand; it was her love for me.