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Today is the anniversary of my birth. I have twenty-eight
years. This diary and the pen I am writing with are the best gifts
I got -- except maybe my cake. R. gave me the diary, the pen, and
the white frosted tiers. He also gave me emerald earbobs. I think
maybe my emeralds are just green glass; I hope maybe they be
genuine peridots. I was born May 25, 1845, at half-past seven in
the morning into slavery on a cotton farm a day’s ride from
Atlanta. My father, Planter, was the master of the place; my mother
was the Mammy. My half-sister, Other, was the belle of five
counties. She was not beautiful, but men seldom recognized this,
caught up in the cloud of commotion and scent in which she moved.
R. certainly didn’t; he married her. But then again, he just
left her. Maybe that means something to me. Maybe he’s just
the unseldom one who do recognize.
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If I strip the flesh off my bones, like they stripped the clothes
off my flesh in the slave market down near the battery in
Charleston, this would be my skeleton: childhood on a cotton farm;
a time of shawl-fetch slavery away in Charleston; a bare-breasted
hour on an auction block; drudge slavery as a maid in
Beauty’s Atlanta brothel, when Milledgeville was the capital
of Georgia and Atlanta was nothing; a season of candle-flame
concubinage in the attic of that house; a watery Grand Tour of
Europe; and, finally, concubinage in my own white clapboard home,
with green shutters and gaslights, in the center (near the train
depot) of a fast-growing city that has become the capital of
Georgia, concubinage that persists till now. How many miles have I
traveled to come back to here?
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They called me Cinnamon because I was skinny as a stick and brown.
But my name is Cynara. Now when I tell it, I say they called me
Cinnamon because I was sweet and spicy. Sweet, hot, strong, and
black -- like a good cup of coffee. Leastways, that’s how
Planter liked his coffee.
Planter used to say I was his cinnamon and Mammy was his
coffee.
He said those words a day I had gotten into trouble dashing before
Other upon the stained-glass colored light that fell in rows of
blue and pink diamonds down the wide hall of the big house. If I
was ten years old, it must have been 1855. I bumped into the leg of
the Hewitt sideboard. Other was ten years old too. It was one of
those days we had back when everything seemed it would always be
just as it has always been. Everything and everyone had a place and
rested deep in it, or so it seemed that day to would-be knights and
ten-year- olds. Then I bumped into that carved leg, and the
shell-shaped bonbon dish jumped off Lady’s sideboard as if it
just wanted to split into a hundred porcelain shards on the
lemon-oiled pine floor. Something had changed, and I had changed
it. Someone wanted to beat me. Mammy said she’d beat me good,
with a belt. Other lied and said she’d knocked into the
table. Said it ’cause she knew it would pain Mammy to give me
a whipping.
And sometimes Planter said it when he heard me making up little
rhymes to sing to myself. Sometimes when Mammy was putting Other to
sleep on a day pallet for a nap, he would call for me to sit at his
feet on the broad porch and sing my little songs to him.
“Cindy, come sing, come sing! Ain’t you my Cinnamon and
she my coffee?” he’d ask. And I’d be slow to go,
because I knew someone might be missing me.
On the day Planter told me I was leaving the place, I asked him
what he had meant when he said that I was his cinnamon and she was
his coffee. He said to me, “I mean a man can do without his
cinnamon but he can’t do without his coffee.” I poked
my lip out. “I mean you’re a gracious
plenty.”
“I belong here?”
“Gracious plenty foreign to me child.”
R. says Planter was an Irishman and all Irish are shiftless, lazy
crackers, no matter how rich they get. He always wants me to look
outside the neighborhood for models of my deportment. He often
mentions that Georgia was once a penal colony. The first time he
said it, I didn’t know what a “penal colony” was.
He says only the English and the French know anything about
gracious plenty. He says when Planter and Mammy got together, they
cooked a broth too rich for potato-water blood.
It was Planter who sent me away, but he got the go-ahead from Mama.
It was the year his third son died, and he said it would be a good
turn for me. I was thirteen the day they rode me off. It was
1858.
Mammy was my Mama. Even though she let me go, I miss her. I miss
her every time I look into a mirror and see her eyes. Sometimes I
comb through my long springy curls and pretend that the hand
holding the comb is hers. But I don’t know what that looks
like. Then I wish I was Other, the girl whose sausage curls
I’ve seen Mammy comb and comb. I wish for the tight kinks of
the comber or the glossy sausages of the combed. I wish not to be
out of the picture.
Mammy always called me Chile. She never called me soft or to her
softness. She called me to do things, usually for Other, who she
called Lamb. It was “Get dressed, Chile!” and
“What’s mah Lamb gwanna wear?”
Excerpted from THE WIND DONE GONE © Copyright 2001 by
Alice Randall. Reprinted with permission by Mariner Books. All
rights reserved.
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The Wind Done Gone