The 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 nostrils and 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 novels and those slow Jane Austen pages. The only one of those I ever loved at all was Mansfield Park. 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.