We are leaving today. And I think back on the first time I left this place for good. Planter say, "You the devil yourself, child."
"How you know that?" I ask.
"Every time I look at you I feel the devil inside me. Your Devil calling to my devil to get out."
"How you get him back in when he come out?" I ask.
"I drown him in whisky," my Daddy says.
"How'm I gonna get my Devil back in?" I ask Daddy.
"I don't know, child, I don't know. What I do know is there's nothing for you on this place, child, nothing but vinegar. I'm not waiting for the day my daughter's husband takes her sister to his bed. It's done everywhere over this county, but it won't do here. Side by side to my Miss, she will suffer in the comparison, and you will suffer if I leave you here to watch her marry." He said all that. It was all mixed up and halting. But he got it out after a time.
I got mine out quickly, at last. "You could set me free."
"It is better be a slave to a rich man than a slave to poverty. Poverty is a cruel master, a cruel master every day. And there are kind masters in the world."
"I don't want to go."
"You distract your mother more than you know. And I have lost too many children for her to lose none."
"What has that to do with me?"
"I'm willing to lose another to make her feel the loss of one. My sorrow needs company."
So he sold me to his friends in Charleston with the promise they would be kind, and they were kind enough. But the influenza came through, and so many died in so few days, so many wills, and I was passed along with the Thomas Elfe chairs from house to house, until, like the chairs, I stumbled into an establishment more starved of cash than elegance, and I was sold. Too many folk died, and I was in the market and my breasts were turning red from the sun. Later, the skin from my chest would come off in sheets. This is my story and I tell it again.
***
I get in Debt's carriage. It was an altogether different girl that got into Planter's then. Back then, before the country was at war, when the belles were still dancing, and the swains still provoked swooning, when the blue blood of the South was huntin', shootin', fishin', drinkin', arguin', and even studyin' a little, at Virginia, at Princeton, at Harvard, and at William and Mary, before the first public brother-against-brother blood had been publicly shed, I went to war, and I was a battlefield.
My weapon against fear was anger. My shield against pain was my own screamless, bloodless, battlefield surgery performed without ether or alcohol. I cut off memories, I gouged out feelings the way you gouge out the little dirty places on a potato you dig up in the field before you serve it at the table. I gouged out dirt holes where I found them in my soul, and in my mind, and in my heart. I amputated and cauterized with searing thoughts, thoughts so disgusting I not only never thought them again, I recollect distinctly I have never thought again in the particular place that spawned the particular thought. And with the bleeding parts cut away, the necessary places cauterized, I survived, as fortunate soldiers do.
I fought my war before the war. And in it I earned my courage. And when I stopped being afraid, there were not many places left to hurt, and I thought so fast and clear—so separate I was from feeling. Feeling slows down most women's minds. Mine is not hindered like that. It is not burdened.
I think quick. So I recall it's not slavery and freedom that separate my now from my then; it's when I could read and when I could not, it's when Mammy loved me and I didn't know it, and when Mammy loved me and I did. It is when Lady was white and when Lady was black. It is still me, and it's still a carriage, but me in the carriage has changed more than I would have thought possible. All my old dreams have come true, and I am too tired to dream anew.
Other's man, house, and farm are mine; this is not a complete surprise. These things were hoped for and achieved. To look in the mirror and know, not simply that my beauty eclipsed hers, but that it is elemental, that it does not require purchase or contrast to be, or to be valued, is a miracle. A miracle begun when? When I saw myself reflected in the Congressman's eyes as I twirled in his arms. I want to see myself, again, in that mirror.